she's totally on track.'
'She's probably just feeling overwhelmed,' I suggested.
'Maybe,' Ralph agreed. 'But there's something else that bothers me. I've thought about it ever since last night. I was there in the room when she told Detective Fraymore the same story she told us. I listened to the whole thing again, Beau. It was almost verbatim. Like a prepared speech.'
'All of it?' I asked.
'Word for word.'
I felt a slight tinge of worry. Most people don't use the exact same words to tell a story the second time. There are always some changes, some slight variations. Unless what's being delivered is a canned speech, lines of dialogue delivered by a consummate actress. Were Ralph Ames and J.P. Beaumont being played for suckers one more time?
In my present mood, that question wasn't one I cared to sit around contemplating. I got up and walked over to the telephone jack.
'If I can commandeer the phone away from your fax machine for a few minutes, I'll see what kind of connections are available between here and Walla Walla.'
Armed with my Frequent Flyer number, I started checking for flights. What I found out in a nutshell was that you can get to Walla Walla from Ashland, but it isn't necessarily easy. There are really only two decent connecting flights per day-one in the early morning, which I'd already missed, and one in the late afternoon, which required an overnight stay. I went ahead and booked that one. With Amber most likely spending another night in the room with Alex and me, I couldn't see that it made a hell of a lot of difference.
I had no more than finished booking the flight and putting down the phone when it rang again. 'Should I answer it?'
Ralph shrugged. 'Go ahead. If it's for me, find out who it is and take a message.'
'Hello.'
'Beau, is that you?'
It was Ron Peters, calling from Seattle. I had told him where Ralph was staying in case he couldn't locate me, but I was surprised to have him call back so soon.
'What's up?'
'I thought you'd like to know that I've just solved the mystery of where Guy Lewis disappeared to.'
'You found him? Is he back home in Seattle?'
'Not quite. He never made it this far,' Ron Peters answered. 'In fact, he never made it past Medford.'
The way he said it made it sound permanent. Not another murder, I thought. 'Don't tell me. Is he dead?'
'No, but it's a miracle he isn't. God knows he should be. The Medford cops and the state police acting together picked him up at six o'clock Sunday morning, drunk as a skunk, and driving his Miata northbound on southbound I-5 at ten miles an hour. He blew a point-two-nine on the breathalizer and was so out of it that they took him to a hospital to dry out instead of throwing him in the drunk tank.'
I was thunderstruck. How could Guy Lewis end up that smashed within eleven hours of our attending an N.A. meeting in the basement of that Ashland church? 'Good work, Ron,' I said.
'Wait a minute. You haven't heard the half of it. By Monday evening, he was sober enough to post bail. He was about to be released from the hospital, when that cop you told me about, Detective Fraymore, showed up to tell Lewis that his wife had been murdered. As soon as he heard, he went into some kind of coronary arrhythmia. It must not have been all that serious, but they kept him there under observation. He's been in the hospital ever since, but he's due to be released late this morning or early this afternoon.'
Fumbling for paper and pencil, I jotted down the name and address of the hospital in Medford. 'Have you had a chance to do any checking on the rest of it?' I asked. 'Anything on either Shore or Daphne?'
'You want it all, and you want it right now, don't you? I'm working as fast as I can, Beau. I can only do so much. Try practicing a little patience.'
I'm nothing if not an ungrateful wretch. 'You're right, Ron. This is great. It's a big help.'
A few words later, we hung up, and I gave Ralph the news. He didn't seem surprised or even all that interested when I told him, but then he hadn't spent the first part of Saturday evening at the N.A. meeting with a then-sober-and-proud-of-it Guy Lewis. I had. After ten years of sobriety, what had blown him off the wagon?
Ralph and I talked a minute or two longer, then I told him I was going to head back to Oak Hill, tell Florence I'd be away overnight, pick up an extra key, and leave a note to that effect for Alex. I didn't mention the hospital address on the piece of paper I'd shoved in my pocket. I didn't say I might go there to see Guy Lewis, because at the time I left Ralph's room at the Ashland Hills, I still didn't know for sure I would.
For one thing, if Gordon Fraymore ever found out I went to see Guy, my ass would be in a sling for certain- not only with Fraymore, but also now with straight-shooting Tony Freeman back home in Seattle. Freeman wasn't the type to rave and carry on, but when he said, 'Act like you're on vacation,' he expected people to pay attention.
As I left Ashland heading north, Guy Lewis bothered me more and more. What would make somebody fall off the wagon after being sober that long? I wondered. God knows I had come close to slipping myself that very day. In retrospect, I could see how emotional overload about Kelly and Jeremy had almost sucked me into a relapse, but I had pulled myself back from it. In the past two days, even though things had continued to spiral downward, I hadn't been in nearly the same jeopardy of taking that first drink as I had been when I ventured into the smoky bar of the Mark Anthony. Guy hadn't been as lucky.
That brought me to another question. How long had Guy Lewis been sober? Ten years stuck in my mind. Something about his first wife leaving him about the same time he dried out.
Between Saturday night and six o'clock Sunday morning, something had pushed Guy Lewis off the edge of a very steep emotional cliff. Old habits die hard, and he had set out to drown his sorrows. In those few hours, he had downed enough booze to require a doctor's care just to regain consciousness. I don't call that slipping. It's more like crashing and burning.
Had Lewis been drinking at the party? I didn't remember smelling booze on his breath when we chatted in the Members' Lounge or seeing him drinking hard stuff later on at the Bowmer, although he could have been. Drunks are cagey that way. They drink and drink, and it's all invisible-up to a point.
Whatever caused it, once he was drunk, he must have decided to leave town, with or without Daphne in the car. Again the question came to mind-was Daphne Lewis still alive at the time Guy headed north?
I was in a 928 equipped with a working cellular phone, so I dialed Ron Peters' extension at the department in Seattle. He didn't answer, and I didn't dare leave a message on his voice mail-not after being told in no uncertain terms to butt out.
And then another thought hit me. Peters had said that when Fraymore came to the hospital to deliver the bad news about Daphne, Guy had suffered some kind of coronary disturbance. That meant one of two things. The first choice was the most obvious: News of his wife's murder had so shocked Guy Lewis that his heart went gunny-bags on him.
Option number two was that Guy already knew Daphne was dead because he personally had something to do with her murder. If that was the case, finding himself trapped in the same room with the man sworn to find his wife's killer might very well have scared the living piss out of him. It would have scared me.
So which was it? Number one or number two? As optometrists are so fond of saying: Which is clearer? This? Or this? I didn't have an answer right then, but I was going to find out.
I'm learning. When I pulled off the freeway in Medford, I stopped at the first gas station and asked for directions. I didn't want to waste any time at all being lost.
CHAPTER 14
I've heard stories about people who age overnight, but Guy Lewis was a true flesh-and-blood example-the first one I ever observed with my own eyes. I found him sitting in a wheelchair in the lobby at Rogue River Medical Center. His skin was sallow; the muscles and skin of his body seemed to have collapsed in on his bones.
