by J. A. Jance
That rankled even more. It was bad enough that Ross Connors was now passing off police work to underemployed economists. But to find out that the crime lab was outsourcing DNA profiling as well was enough to make this old cop feel like a member of an endangered species-an exceedingly cranky endangered species.
So I handed over my credit card number, kept my mouth shut, and just tried to make it through.
“What’s the matter?” Mel asked.
We had finally escaped the overheated ballroom and were standing outside the hotel in a crush of people waiting for an outnumbered and overwhelmed crew of parking valets to retrieve the Mercedes from the garage.
“How did you ever get mixed up with that bunch of women?” I asked, thinking most particularly of the good professor of women’s studies who had given me an earful of invective over the dessert course.
Okay, my comment was more of a growl than anything else. And it could have been phrased far more diplomatically. But I didn’t expect what happened next. Mel simply turned and walked away. Make that stalked away. The manner in which she took off was far more definitive than mere walking.
“Where are you going?” I asked, trailing after her.
“To catch a cab,” she said over her shoulder.
“But…” I objected.
“I’m going home,” she added. “To Bellevue.”
I guess our voices were somewhat raised, and people started to gawk. Just then the valet showed up with my car and honked twice from the curb. By the time I tipped him and retrieved the Mercedes, Mel was nowhere in sight.
So, since she had said she was going to Bellevue, I drove there, too. There were no lights on in her apartment, so I parked outside and waited. And waited. Finally, forty-five minutes later, and needing to use the facilities, I headed back to Seattle. When I drove down into the underground garage I realized the error in my thinking. Her BMW was gone. So she had ridden the cab back to Belltown Terrace to pick up her car so she could drive herself across the lake to Bellevue. No wonder I had missed her.
Up in the apartment I soon discovered that her briefcase and her computer, along with Todd Hatcher’s stack of abstracts, were all among the missing. So were her nightgown, bathrobe, and makeup. I glanced in her closet. I’m sure some of her clothing was gone as well, but I couldn’t tell how much. If I could have sorted that out, it might have told me if I was dead or really dead. By then it was too late to consider driving back to Bellevue. I tried calling both her cell and her landline, but she didn’t answer. Finally I gave up. I removed my newly purchased tuxedo, which hadn’t exactly done me a hell of a lot of good, and took myself to bed.
When the phone rang bright and early the next morning, I grabbed for it eagerly, hoping Mel would be on the other end of the line. She wasn’t.
“Hi, Dad,” Scott said. “How’s it going?”
Medium, I thought. “Fine,” I said. “How was your day yesterday?”
“Great!” he said. “I took Cherisse out to Lake Tapps and showed her our old stomping grounds. Geez, there are lots of houses out there now. I mean, our house used to be way out in the country. And the lake’s a lot smaller than I remembered.”
“But it was fun?” I asked.
“Sure. We had a blast. This morning we’re going to pick Lars up and take him to breakfast at the Mecca. Do you and Mel want to come along?”
I looked at Mel’s empty pillow. “I think we’ll take a pass on that,” I said.
“And then we’re going to go on playing tourist,” he said. “The Arboretum, Snoqualmie Falls, the aquarium. Care to join us for any of that?”
If I ever go back to Snoqualmie Falls, the place where Anne Corley died, it will be way too soon. “No,” I said. “I’m working on a case. I should probably spend some time on that, but a man’s got to eat. What are your plans for dinner?”
“Don’t really have any,” Scott said, sounding a bit abashed. “We’ve pretty much blown our budget.”
I remembered what it was like to be young and broke and wanting to impress your new wife but worrying about whether or not you’d be able to pay next month’s bills if you did so. Thanks to Anne Corley, my financial situation had taken an amazing turn for the better since those tough old days.
“Dinner’s on me, then,” I said. “What sounds good?”
“Steak?” Scott asked hopefully.
“We’ll go to El Gaucho, then,” I said. “They have some of the best steaks in town, and it’s only a couple of blocks from here. Say around seven or so. I’ll call for a reservation.”
“What happened to Kelly and Jeremy?” Scott asked. “I called to invite them to breakfast. The guy at the front desk said they’d checked out.”
“I guess Kelly wanted to go home.”
“She was acting weird,” Scott said. “Even for Kelly. I mean, if this is all because of Mel, it’s ridiculous. You do get to live your own life, don’t you?”
My sentiments exactly, I thought, although looking at Mel’s empty pillow made me wonder if her presence in my life was still an issue.
“Seems like I should,” I said.
“See you this evening,” Scott returned. “Where’s the restaurant, by the way?”
“Just come to the house,” I said. “We can walk from here.”
Missing Mel, I rolled out of bed and went out into the kitchen to make my own coffee. Then, while the coffee brewed, I called Nick down at El Gaucho. Mel and I go there enough that I have the number programmed into my cell phone. No one answered that early on a Saturday morning, but I left my name and a message. I brought in the newspapers from the front door, but I didn’t bother opening them. For some reason I didn’t feel up to working a crossword puzzle.
Instead, I sat in my recliner, sipping coffee and brooding. Finally I threw caution to the winds and dialed Mel’s cell.
Much to my surprise, she answered. “I’m not speaking to you, remember?”
This seemed like an egregious overreaction to whatever I had or hadn’t done, so I decided to ignore it. “If you were speaking to me,” I countered, “what would you say?”
“‘Those women’!” she said, repeating my ill-chosen words with an inflection I recognized all too well. “How did I get hooked up with ‘those women’?”
“Mel, look. I’m sorry. I’m sure I was out of line, but you’re not seeing this from my point of view. I spent dinner stuck next to that dreadful professor, who really does hate men, by the way, and listening to all of those awful stories. It seemed like every story and every single one of the women there said pretty much the same thing-that whatever had happened to them was all my fault. That I was somehow responsible. I’ll bet even Anita Bowdin’s husband…”
“Calvin Lowman,” Mel supplied. “And he’s not her husband.”
“Whatever,” I said. “I’ll bet even he was squirming in his seat. Every man there was probably doing the same thing.”
“Is there a purpose to this call?” Mel asked.
Her crisp tone would have deflected even the most determined of life insurance salesmen. “I invited Scott and Cherisse to dinner at El Gaucho tonight at seven,” I said hurriedly. “I was hoping you’d come, too.”
“What about Kelly and Jeremy?”
“They went home,” I said. “To Ashland.”
There was a pause. “I’ll think about it,” Mel said. “But don’t hold your breath. And there is a reason,” she added.
“I’m sorry?”
“A reason I’m involved with ‘those women.’ A reason I’m on the board. I just don’t like to talk about it, but maybe I’ll tell you sometime. If I start speaking to you again, that is.”
With that she hung up, leaving me with no clear idea of where I stood. She claimed she wasn’t speaking to me, but she had been. And the other part-the part she had left unsaid-about the reason behind her involvement with SASAC put a hole in the pit of my stomach. I had never even considered that someone as slick as Mel might have some dark corner in her past where she,
too, had been gravely mistreated. If something like that had happened to her, I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear about it. Once I did, would I feel obliged to go out, track the jerk down, and throttle him with my bare hands? That would make a lot more sense than sending donations to SASAC!!!
I called Mel right back. “I know you’re still not speaking to me,” I said quickly, “but if you wanted to come back to the house and work together on Todd Hatcher’s stuff, I promise I won’t say a single word out of line.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said, “but I need some space, Beau-space and time.” She hung up again.
Rebuffed, I knew I couldn’t afford to spend the day sitting around thinking about Mel and what I did or didn’t know. I needed to do something, to take some kind of action. Twiddling my thumbs wasn’t an option when what I really wanted to do was go out and knock a few heads. So I did the next best thing. I called the DMV and ran a check on Carol and Jack Lawrence. Once I had their address information, I headed for Leavenworth, two and a half hours away, on the far side of the Cascades.
Many small used-to-be logging towns in rural Washington have drifted into almost ghost-town obscurity. Several of the burgs along Highway 2 run perpetual going-out-of-business sales in the form of retired churches, which, now devoid of parishioners, live on in a tawdry, makeshift fashion as threadbare antique malls.
Leavenworth, too, was once headed in that direction and might well have suffered the same fate had not some enterprising city fathers-and mothers, I’m sure-decided to reinvent the place. They slapped on layers of Bavarian facades, dressed everybody and his uncle in lederhosen, and declared the city a tourist attraction. Such is the magic of self-fulfilling prophecies that the ploy worked remarkably well. Now thousands of people flock there for their faux Octoberfest and for their annual Christmas-lighting ceremonies. For authenticity’s sake, it helps that Leavenworth is high enough in the mountains that this holiday extravaganza usually takes place in frigid snow, with the occasional blizzard thrown in.
If I sound somewhat churlish about all this, let me say that the one time I bravely went there is also when the “occasional” blizzard happened. That storm resulted in a combination of record snowfall in Stevens Pass and an avalanche on I-90 at Snoqualmie Pass, a one-two punch that brought most of Washington’s east-west travel to a halt. Karen and the kids and I didn’t make it back over the mountains until Tuesday afternoon, two days late for both work and school. Since this was March instead of November or December, however, I figured I was safe enough on the weather score. And since it wasn’t Christmas, there was no need for me to be brimming over with peace on earth and all that jazz-especially when it came to Mr. Jack Lawrence.
During the long solitary drive from Seattle across a still snow-bordered Stevens Pass I had plenty of time for thinking. Gradually I was able to let go of the Mel situation and turn my attention to the problem of Jack and Carol Lawrence. As I drove I realized this would probably be nothing more than a useless fishing expedition. In fact, if Lawrence hadn’t given his stepdaughter such a tough time, I probably wouldn’t have bothered trying to interview him at all. It turns out, though, that I’m a great believer in giving people like him the opportunity to reap what they sow. Besides, I found his interest in not discussing Tony Cosgrove’s decades-old disappearance most interesting.
It was late on a sunny but surprisingly chill morning when I pulled up at the Lawrences’ mailbox on Lavetta Road south of Leavenworth proper. Lavetta Road isn’t so much a road as it is a very angular circle. Maybe they should have called it Lavetta Oblong. With the help of my trusty GPS, I managed to locate the long winding driveway marked “Lawrence,” which took off from the southernmost curve of Lavetta and headed off into the forest.
The house itself was one of those some-assembly-required log cabins where someone else cuts up, notches, numbers, and fits together all the tree trunks necessary to build the house. They’re then taken apart, loaded onto a truck, and hauled to wherever the house is being built. At that point the hapless homeowner has to reassemble the pieces himself or pay someone else to do it. Since Lawrence was an engineer type, I figured he would have done the work himself.
This one was a large two-story affair with a steeply pitched roof and a covered porch that ran across the entire front of the house. A single vehicle was parked outside-a muddied Subaru Forester that seemed much the worse for wear. Out of force of habit, I jotted down the license number, then started up the walkway. In true Leavenworth fashion, the metal door knocker had been fashioned to resemble a nutcracker. I gave it a good bash and waited to see if anyone would answer.
The door was cracked open the distance of a short length of fastened security chain. “Yes?” a woman asked questioningly, while remaining mostly out of sight behind the partially opened door.
Carol Lawrence was about my age. Her silver hair was pulled back in a ponytail, but even that small glimpse revealed a resemblance between her and her daughter that was nothing short of striking. She looked as if she had been crying, and I wondered what about.
“What do you want?” she asked.
I held up my ID. “Mrs. Lawrence,” I began, “if you have a few moments, I’d like to speak to you.”
By the time the words were out of my mouth she was already trying to slam the door. My foot, schooled by years of actual door-to-door Fuller Brush salesmanship, was firmly planted in the way.
“Go away,” she ordered. “I’m not talking to you and neither is Jack. Tony’s been gone for a quarter of a century. There’s no reason to bring it all back up.”
“But your daughter-”
“My daughter disapproves of me,” she said. “I didn’t wait the whole seven years, and she’s never forgiven me for that. But you know what? I’m the mother. I get to live my life the way I want to. Now go away.”
“Are you aware that your husband went to see DeAnn yesterday?” I asked. “That he was off the charts and threatened her? She was very upset.”
“Look,” Carol said impatiently, “Jack is DeAnn’s stepfather. They have never gotten along and never will. Not only that, I’ve finally figured out that I can’t fix it. So please go away and leave me alone before my husband comes home and finds you here.”
“You’re saying he would be upset by my being here? Why’s that? We’re just doing a routine follow-up on your missing first husband. I can’t see why Mr. Lawrence finds that so disturbing-unless he has something to hide, that is.”
“Jack’s a very private man,” Carol insisted. “He doesn’t like people nosing around in our private lives. We want to be left alone. Just go away.”
“The way he’s acting is enough to make me think maybe the two of you were an item long before Tony went fishing up on Spirit Lake.”
“So what if Jack and I were an ‘item’ back then, as you call it?” Carol demanded hotly. “We’ve been married for twenty-five years now. That should count for something. You don’t have any idea what my life was like then, and you have no right to judge me now. Neither does my daughter. My husband is a very private man. The idea that DeAnn brought this up-”
“She didn’t,” I interjected. “DeAnn had nothing to do with it. The attorney general’s office is doing routine follow-ups on missing persons cases from all over the state. That’s how your former husband’s name came up. Period.”
“Oh,” Carol said, sounding somewhat subdued. “We thought…”
I took a business card from my pocket and passed it through the door. I didn’t expect her to take it, but she did.
“I don’t care what you thought,” I told her curtly. “We are conducting an active investigation at this time. Please let your husband know that I am going to need to talk to both of you sooner or later. You can make it easy or you can make it hard.”
She studied the card, then unlatched the chain. “All right.” She sounded resigned. “Come on in. Like I said, Jack isn’t home right now. You probably passed each other somewhere between here and Seattle. What
do you want to know?”
For the next hour or so we went over the same ground I had covered with DeAnn days earlier. I asked many of the same questions and heard the same answers, but with one telling difference. I had left DeAnn Cosgrove’s home convinced she was telling the truth, or at least the truth as she knew it.
When my interview with Carol was over I left the Lawrences’ sprawling log house living room with the distinct impression Carol had been lying through her teeth. I didn’t know why, not for sure, but I had my suspicions. All I had to do now was to learn enough about the case to catch her in one of those lies.
Like Donnie Cosgrove, I was beginning to believe that Mount Saint Helens had nothing at all to do with his first father-in-law’s disappearance.
“Have Jack give me a call,” I told Carol the last thing before I stepped off her front porch to return to my car. “You have my number.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll tell him.”
We both knew he wouldn’t call. Most likely Jack Lawrence would play hard to get. That didn’t bother me, though. Tony Cosgrove had been gone for a quarter of a century. I had all the time in the world.
Without Mel there to ride herd on me I had missed breakfast, so I stopped off at the Brewery Pub in Leavenworth to grab some lunch before heading back to Seattle. As I waited for my hamburger, I was thinking about DeAnn Cosgrove and her mother. DeAnn evidently still disapproved of her mother’s moving on twenty-five years after it had happened. That certainly boded ill for me and Kelly.
The waitress was delivering my hamburger when Kendall Jackson called.
“Just left Elaine Manning,” he told me. “Thanks for that, by the way. What she had to say was interesting, and we’ll follow up on some of the leads she suggested, but I’m not holding my breath. Without something more solid than her suspicion…”
