plane home.'
Ames cleared his throat. 'That's not exactly realistic, is it, Beau? What if she won't go?'
'Won't go?' I echoed. 'Of course she'll go. She's just like me, stubborn as all get-out, but she'll listen to reason. She has to.'
'Not necessarily. If she's planning a wedding for next week, she may have decidedly different thoughts on the matter. After all,' he added, 'she is eighteen, you know.'
'I don't care how old she is. She may be eighteen, but she doesn't have the sense God gave little green apples.'
Ralph Ames and I have these kinds of disagreements all the time. He came on the scene at approximately the same time that Anne Corley, my second wife, shot through my life like some brilliant, sky-illuminating meteor. The profound impact she had on me is totally out of proportion to the amount of time the two of us actually spent together. When she died, she left me with more money than I know what to do with.
Along with the money came Ralph Ames, who serves as general overseer of not only the money, but also of me. Through the years, and despite our somewhat divergent views, I've come to value both his unwavering friendship and his innate good sense. We argue from time to time, but more often than not I end up paying attention to what he says and doing things his way.
'Don't you still have some use-it-or-lose-it-type vacation time coming to you?' he asked me after a slight pause.
When Ralph asks a question, he usually does so in the same way most good detectives do-knowing, before he ever opens his mouth, exactly what the right answer should be.
'You know I do,' I returned irritably. 'We talked about it last time you were here.'
'So why not take some time off? See if you can schedule vacation for all next week,' he suggested. 'That way, if it's possible to bring Kelly around, you'll have more time to make it work. If you drive down today and come right back tomorrow, you'll be under a tremendous amount of pressure. So will she.'
'And what if I can't make it work?' I growled, tweaked by Ralph's irritating and unreasonable reasonableness.
'Look on the bright side,' Ralph returned cheerfully. 'That way, you'll be there in time for the wedding.'
Count on Ralph to discover some remote silver lining.
'Whatever you decide,' he continued, 'I'm still planning on coming to Seattle tomorrow. Let me know if there's anything I can do. And say hello to Alex for me when you see her.'
'Right,' I said. 'She's the next person on my list to call. I'll give her your regards.'
I waited until I was seated in my leather recliner and drinking coffee before I dialed Alexis Downey's number. Middle-aged dating is hell. First you have to sort through what's out there to see if there's anyone you like who might possibly like you back. Do that, and things become even more complicated.
In the past two months, I had discovered a good deal to like about Alexis Downey. There were also more than a few stumbling blocks-a major one being her huge, man-hating tabby cat named Hector. Another is her bed.
Alex prefers to sleep on one of those crazy futon things, which she folds up into an unusable couch by day and turns into an equally uncomfortable bed by night. She insists my king-size Posturepedic mattress hurts her back. So we spend time together, quite a bit of it, actually-fun, enjoyable time-but one or the other of us is always creeping home to our respective beds in the middle of the night. From a neutral-mattress perspective, a trip to Ashland might have been fun, but not now, not with Kelly living there.
Once I had Alex on the phone, I tried explaining to her exactly why I was on my way to Ashland by myself, why a joint trip seemed totally out of the question. At least to me.
Alexis Downey had her own thoughts on the matter. 'Like hell,' she declared heatedly. 'If you're going, so am I.'
'But what will I tell Kelly about you?' I asked.
'What do you think you'll tell her? Your sex life is none of Kelly's damn business, that's what. How soon are we leaving?'
After years of Fuller Brush training, I recognize assumed closes when I hear them even though I'm not always quick-footed enough to dodge out of the way. Alexis didn't ask whether or not she was invited. All she wanted was an estimated time of departure so she'd know how long she had to pack.
'Can you be ready in forty-five minutes?' I returned.
'No problem. I'll farm Hector out with Helen upstairs. Then I'll call my friend Denver down in Ashland and get her working on rustling us up a room and some play tickets. At the last minute, tickets may be damned hard to come by.'
'Denver?' I said. 'You have a girlfriend named Denver?'
'Denver Holloway. Didn't I ever tell you about her? She's directing at the Festival this year. If anybody can get rush tickets, she can.'
Advancing age has increased my ability to give in gracefully. 'I'll be there at eight o'clock sharp,' I told her.
After that I called Sergeant Watkins, the desk sergeant on the homicide squad, and filled him in. Watty wasn't thrilled by my last-minute scheduling of vacation time, but he understood. He and I share the misfortune of being fathers to troublesome adolescent daughters. His youngest had married some two months earlier. Watty was well aware that I'd been worried about Kelly. He was one of the few people at the department who knew I'd hired a private eye.
'Good luck on straightening Kelly out,' he told me, 'but I'm betting you won't be able to change her mind one iota. As far as I'm concerned, boys are a hell of a lot easier to raise. With boys, you only have to worry about one penis. With girls, you have to worry about all of them.'
His helpful, fatherly comment didn't improve my frame of mind. 'Thanks for all the encouragement, Watty. I needed that.'
I could hear him grinning into the telephone. 'Always glad to be of service,' he said.
I slammed down the receiver.
The Automobile Association of America says it's a ten-hour drive from Seattle to Ashland averaging fifty miles an hour. I didn't drive Triple A's recommended fifty. I threw a hastily packed suitcase into the 928, gassed up, and collected Alex from her condo on Queen Anne Hill at eight on the dot. Once on I-5, I tucked the Guard-red Porsche in with the crush of fast-moving southbound traffic and stayed in the middle of the pack.
Fortunately, Alexis Downey isn't a backseat driver. She doesn't have to get out of the car every mile or two, either. With short but necessary pit stops in Portland and Roseburg, we turned off the freeway into Ashland at 4:45 that afternoon.
As we headed south, steady rain gradually gave way first to drizzle and then to occasional showers. While we were passing through the Siskiyous, partly cloudy blue skies appeared overhead. By Medford, it was full-fledged summer, but I didn't notice. I was far too distracted to enjoy what should have been a pleasant, scenic drive. Preoccupied with thoughts about Kelly, I'm sure I wasn't much of a travel companion to Alex.
Kelly had been missing from home for almost four months. I should have been overjoyed that Dave had located her. But I'm a cop in what I call the Nasty Nineties. I've seen what happens to runaways who take to living on the streets for even as short a period of time as a few weeks. I've witnessed the heartbreaking aftermath when anxious parents, thinking they're getting their kid back, come downtown to pick up the pieces. Or else to identify a body. With all the stuff that's out on the streets now-drugs, AIDS, herpes, gang warfare-even if the kid isn't dead, what the parents get back isn't the same person who left home a few days or weeks or months earlier.
Fortunately, Alex is a very patient woman. For most of the way, she left me alone, but finally even she could no longer tolerate the thick, oppressive silence.
'Have you decided what to do?' she asked.
'Murder's out,' I replied glumly, 'for professional reasons if nothing else.'
She laughed. 'No. Seriously, Beau, what options do you have?'
'How about offering him a bribe, sort of a reverse dowry? Maybe Jeremy Todd whatever-his-name-is has heard through the grapevine that I'm supposed to be loaded. It wouldn't surprise me if he's only in it for the money. Kelly has lousy taste in men.'
'Getting married isn't exactly the end of the world,' Alex argued. 'Some of the people I went to school with
