Long Time Gone

“What night?”

“Friday. At dinnertime. It was like Dad went crazy or something. I’ve never seen him act that way. And then there’s whatever’s going on with him and Mom,” Tracy added. “They don’t even sleep in the same bedroom anymore. I’m afraid they’re going to get a divorce.”

I had been best man at Ron and Amy’s wedding. For years, while they rented a unit here in Belltown Terrace, Ron, Amy, and the girls had paraded in and out of my place with easy familiarity. I had known about the little comings and goings in their lives, their tragedies and triumphs. I had heard about soccer games and Girl Scout cookies and bandaged knees and fingers. Once they had moved into Amy’s folks’ old place up on Queen Anne Hill, a lot of that close, day-to-day interaction had fallen by the wayside. Still, hearing from Tracy that Ron and Amy’s marriage might be in trouble gave me another shock. Ron certainly hadn’t hinted anything about marital difficulties when he had stopped by earlier.

So I did the first thing people do under those circumstances-I hit the denial button.

“It probably just seems that way to you,” I said. “Maybe things aren’t as bad as you think they are.”

“They are, too,” Tracy sobbed. “Amy’s the only real mother I’ve ever known. What if Dad goes to jail and Amy divorces him? What then? She’ll keep Jared, but what about Heather and me? What’ll happen to us? Our whole family will be wiped out.”

While I was doing denial, Tracy was busy conjuring up every worst-case scenario in the book. If my SHIT squad colleagues were going to be asking me questions about Ron Peters tomorrow morning, this was information I would have been far better off not knowing, but I couldn’t ask Tracy to stop talking. She needed somebody to listen to her right then, and J. P. Beaumont was the only guy who was handy.

“I had no idea things were this bad,” I said quietly.

“And it’s all because of her!” Tracy said forcefully. “It’s been getting worse ever since she came to live with us.”

Teenagers aren’t long on using proper pronoun references, and her statement confused me. “Who’s living with you?” I asked.

“Amy’s sister,” Tracy said. “Aunt Molly.”

I had met Amy’s prickly older sister, Molly Wright, on only one occasion. What little I knew about her came more from published news stories rather than anything Ron and Amy had told me. Molly’s now former husband, Aaron, had been a high-flying dot-com millionaire CFO before the dot-coms all became dot-gones. Molly and Aaron had been an integral part of the local society scene, with their pictures prominently featured in the press coverage of various high-profile charitable events. When the dot-coms disappeared, lots of people lost jobs and money. Aaron lost both, and his freedom as well. In the subsequent financial meltdown, someone discovered that he’d been cooking the company books. What ultimately got him locked away in a federal prison cell was tax evasion.

“I had no idea Molly was living with you,” I said.

“Well, she has been,” Tracy said, “for months now. And she’s like, well…she’s not a very nice person. She’s always picking away at Dad behind his back and causing trouble.”

My one personal interaction with Molly Wright had been at Ron and Amy’s wedding. Had it been up to me, I would have upgraded Molly from Tracy’s tame “not nice” to a J. P. Beaumont eighteen-carat bitch. If Molly had installed herself under Ron Peters’s roof, I could see how the man might be feeling a little stressed out.

But Tracy hadn’t come jogging down Queen Anne Hill in what was now a full-scale blizzard to cry on my shoulder about her evil step-auntie. She had come to talk about her father. In light of the fact that SHIT was going to be investigating the case, I knew I should stay out of it, but Ron Peters is a friend of mine-my best friend. I couldn’t leave it alone.

“Tell me about your dad, Tracy,” I said. “What was going on between him and…”

I paused, uncertain of how I should refer to the dead woman.

Tracy stepped into the breach. “Rosemary?”

“Yes.”

Tracy shrugged and put down her empty mug. “I guess she started talking about the custody thing a few months ago, saying she wanted us to come live with her. I turn eighteen in just a couple of months, so I wasn’t worried about it, but Heather was. She turns sixteen in three months. It would mean changing schools just before her junior year, and that sucks. Dad asked Heather what she wanted to do. She said she’d run away from home before she’d go live in Tacoma, or else she’d do something drastic, whatever that means. Dad said fine, that he’d talk to Rosemary and tell her the answer was no. And he did, but then, last Friday, when we were having dinner, there was a knock on the door, which Jared opened. This guy comes in and serves Dad with papers because Rosemary isn’t taking no for an answer. She’s decided to take him to court.”

“What happened then?” I asked.

Tracy sighed. “Like I said, Dad went nuts. Friday is pizza night at our house. When the guy left, Dad picked up a pizza box and Frisbeed it at the door. Pieces of pizza went everywhere. I’ve seen Dad angry sometimes, whenever Heather and I did something bad, but I’ve never seen him act like that. It scared me, and it scared Mom, too. I know because I heard her talking about it with Molly later, after Dad was gone.

“Anyway, after he threw the box, he turned and wheeled himself out of the room. We all followed Dad out to the carport. Mom asked him where he thought he was going. He said Tacoma. He said he was going to talk to Rosemary and set her straight about a few things. Mom kept trying to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t listen. He just got in the car and drove away like he hadn’t heard a word she said. She was crying when he left.”

“How long was he gone?”

Tracy paused before speaking. “A long time,” she answered finally. “Mom was upset, so I took Jared into the family room to watch Finding Nemo. I thought I heard Dad come home while we were still watching the movie, but I must have been mistaken. Jared and I both fell asleep on the couch. I woke up around two. I put Jared to bed in his room, and then I went to bed, too. My bedroom is right over the driveway. I had just gotten into bed and turned out the lights when I heard Dad’s car.”

I thought about that for a minute. “Your father said he talked to two Tacoma detectives this afternoon. Did he give you any details about how Rosemary died?”

Tracy shook her head. “It happened over the weekend. Some guy out walking his dog found her body by the water yesterday afternoon. They can’t tell exactly how long she’s been dead because of the cold.”

I nodded. Extreme cold weather delays some of the tissue changes medical examiners rely on in approximating time of death.

Exhausted, Tracy closed her eyes. Once again she leaned back against the cold window, as though she no longer had the energy to sit up on her own. She had come to me looking for a place to unload her worst nightmare-her suspicion that her beloved father had murdered her biological mother. I understood the kind of emotional barriers that had stood in the way of her doing that.

When a loved one turns homicide suspect, family members are usually the last to tumble to the idea that their husband or son or daughter or wife could possibly be guilty of such a heinous crime. Some, no matter how convincing the evidence, never do accept a family member’s guilt. The fact that Tracy had reached such a damning conclusion so early in the process was something I couldn’t ignore. The guys from my office wouldn’t ignore it either. No wonder Tracy was worried. So was I. Tracy was focused on her father’s angry outburst with the pizza box. I was concerned about how much Ron hadn’t mentioned when he stopped by to tell me about Rosemary’s death.

“I’m sure everything will be fine,” I told Tracy, trying to sound more reassuring than I felt. “No doubt your father has some perfectly reasonable explanation for where he went and what he was doing so late on Friday evening.”

Tracy looked at me pleadingly. “Do you really think so, Uncle Beau?” she asked. “Or are you just saying that to make me feel better?”

For an instant a terrible thought crossed my mind. Was Tracy as innocent as she seemed, or was her trip to see me a preemptive strike designed to point suspicion in her father’s direction and away from her? The thought was there, but looking into her guileless blue eyes, I banished it as quickly as it came.

“Would you believe a little of both?” I asked.

She gave me a faint smile. “I’d believe it,” she said. Unfolding her legs, Tracy reached for her jacket. “I’d better be going,” she said.

I glanced outside. Far below, streetlights and headlights glowed in golden halos through the falling snow. I