Doubt kids younger than that could do either. So we’re talking about 1950 or, at the very latest, 1951.
She’s evidently not in school. It could be because it’s summertime (sunny) or that she isn’t going to school yet. If they were living in Washington State, when did schools around here start offering half-day kindergarten? Need to check school records to see if I can find her listed.
Need to take a look at the photos she still has, the ones in the boxes her foster mother kept for her.
Need details about the perpetrators’ vehicle. What make and model?
Need to check old DMV and driver’s license records for possible addresses on her parents.
What happened after the murder? There must have been an investigation. Did detectives ever take a statement from Bonnie Jean? If not, why not?
It was interesting to realize that I was treating this as an unsolved case simply because it was unresolved from Sister Mary Katherine’s point of view. More than half a century had passed since the murder. It was likely that the two people responsible for Mimi’s death had long since been brought to justice. Hopefully they had paid for their vicious crime either through execution or by serving long prison stays. Verification of that would, I hoped, put a stop to Sister Mary Katherine’s haunting nightmares. And, with any kind of luck, it would also short-circuit my own potential problem with the attorney general and the archbishop’s right-hand man.
I was so involved in watching the videos and taking notes that I completely lost track of time. Since my body was still functioning on Honolulu time, I was astonished to realize it was close to midnight. I was on my way to bed when the phone rang. I picked up, expecting the caller to be Ron Peters. Instead, it was his daughter Tracy.
“Uncle Beau?” she asked. “I’m downstairs. Can I come up?”
I buzzed her into the building. Despite the long elevator ride, when she greeted me, her light brown hair and her purple-and-gold Franklin High School jogging suit were both dotted with not quite melted snowflakes. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks flushed.
“Tracy!” I exclaimed. “Come in. What on earth are you doing here?”
Overheated and still out of breath, she stripped off the damp jacket and dropped cross-legged onto the window seat. “You heard what happened?” she asked.
“Your dad stopped by and told me on his way home,” I said. “I’m sorry, Tracy, so very sorry.”
“I’m not,” she returned hotly. “Sorry, I mean. She never was much of a mother.”
By any standard, this was an unarguably true statement. Still, it was a hurtful admission for a teenager to have to make, and there were tears in Tracy’s eyes as she said it.
“Your mother was a troubled woman,” I countered, trying to make the poor girl feel better. “I’m sure she did the best she could.”
“Her best was pretty damned lame.”
While Tracy leaned back against the window, I hovered uncertainly near the front door. Now the hurt and anger in Tracy’s voice prodded me into action. “Can I get you something?” I asked. “A soda, maybe, or hot chocolate?”
“Hot chocolate would be nice. I remember how, when we were kids and came upstairs to visit, you always had marshmallows to put in our hot chocolate. Big ones, too. Not those puny little ones that taste like cardboard.”
“I remember all right,” I said. “But no marshmallows today. Sorry. When you and Heather stopped dropping by on a regular basis, that last bag of marshmallows turned to solid rock. If I had known you were coming…”
A few minutes later, when I returned from the kitchen, Tracy was staring outside at the falling snow. It was coming down steadily-the flakes as big as feathers whirling in the city lights. I handed her a mug of hot chocolate and then sat down beside her.
“Do your folks know you’re here?”
“No.”
“How did you get out without their knowing about it?” I asked.
“Through a door in the furnace room,” she answered. Tracy glanced up at me through lowered eyelashes. Catching what must have been a clear flash of disapproval on my face, she bristled. “Heather’s always sneaking in and out that way and getting away with it. Why shouldn’t I? After all, I’m older than she is.”
Sneaking in and out of the house hadn’t been part of my teenage years. I doubt it was for many kids back then. For one thing, my mother would have killed me. But things are different now. My own kids had straightened me out on that score while they were still in junior high.
“Heather sneaks out, too?” I asked.
“All the time,” she answered. “To see Dillon.”
“Who’s he?”
“Her boyfriend-Dillon. He’s a jerk. Mom and Dad don’t like him either. Since they won’t let her hang out with him, he comes by when they’re at work, or else she sneaks out to see him late at night, after they’re asleep.”
I wondered if Tracy was telling me this with the expectation that I wouldn’t tell her father. Or was she hoping I would?
“You said you needed to talk,” I told her. “What about?”
Suddenly Tracy’s tears began to flow. “Why did Rosemary have to try to get custody of Heather?” Tracy wailed. “Heather didn’t want to go. Why would she? Her friends are here. If she’d had to go live in Tacoma, she wouldn’t have known anybody. It would have been awful for her. Why did she have to go and spoil everything?”
I was struck as much by Tracy’s blaming the victim as I was to hear her referring to her biological mother by her first name, rather than calling her “Mother” or “Mom.” I certainly shared Tracy’s sentiments about Heather’s being plucked out of her comfortable home and settled situation in the Seattle school district in order to be dragged off to the wilds of Tacoma, but since it was now clear that Heather wouldn’t be making that move, how could everything be spoiled? Besides, with Rosemary Peters dead, I somehow felt obliged to defend the poor woman.
“I’ve never been a mother,” I told Tracy, “so I certainly don’t know everything that went on in Rosemary Peters’s life. I’ve been a father, though. I’ll be the first to admit that when my kids were little, I wasn’t much of a dad. I had a lot of the same difficulties your mother had.”
Tracy looked at me. “You did drugs?” she asked.
“My drug of choice was alcohol,” I told her. “I was into booze big-time. For years after Karen and I got divorced and while I was still drinking, Scott and Kelly didn’t have much to do with me. I don’t blame them. And you shouldn’t blame your mother either. Once she ditched the drugs, she probably realized what she had been missing all those years and simply wanted to reestablish a relationship with you two girls. It’s understandable that she’d like to get to know her daughters again. She was hoping to make up for lost time.”
My answer didn’t have much of a beneficial effect. Tracy turned away from me and stared out the window, saying nothing.
“Look,” I said. “What’s happened to your family is terrible. Your mother was never a responsible parent, and that’s too bad-for you and, even more so, for her. But having even a bad parent murdered is an incredible tragedy. It’s not something that goes away. It stays with you forever. When something like this happens, it comes completely out of the blue. It’s so unexpected that it hits you in all kinds of ways. Many of these reactions won’t make sense. Your mother essentially abandoned you to drugs, so maybe you think you shouldn’t feel anything right now, but you’re hurting anyway. And part of you is mad as hell at your mother for dying. That’s a standard reaction, too. It’s like she’s abandoned you all over again. That’s how grief works, Tracy. You’re alive and she’s dead. You’re operating in a storm of warring emotions. Anger is only one of them.”
Tracy took a ragged breath. “I’m scared, too,” she whispered.
“Scared of what?” I asked. “That the same thing will happen to you? That your mother’s killer will come looking for you?”
“No,” Tracy said, shaking her head. “I’m scared he did it.”
“He who?”
“I’m scared my dad did it, Uncle Beau. I’m afraid he’s the one who killed her.”
There it was, out on the table. The admission was shocking enough to take my breath away.
“That’s crazy!” I exclaimed. “Why on earth would you even think such a thing?”
“You don’t know what Dad’s been like lately,” she said. “It’s been like living with a stranger. And you should have seen what happened the other night when that poor guy served the papers about the hearing.”
