once you get here.”
Thanks to a legacy from Anne Corley, Mel and I had flown down to California on a private jet. All we’d have to do was step off the plane and wait for the luggage to be loaded into our waiting car before we drove it off the tarmac, but rubbing my boss’s nose in that seemed like a bad idea.
“I’ll make it,” I said. “I’ll drop Mel off at the condo to pick up the other car and then I’ll head out.”
“All right,” Ross said. “Be there as soon as you can.”
“Do you have a number for the Kittitas M.E.’s office?” I asked.
“Sure. Can you take it down?”
I had no intention of telling him that I was flat on my back in the first-aid station and I wasn’t about to ask the nurse to lend me a pen or pencil.
“Can you text it to me?” I asked.
This was something coming from someone who had come to twenty-first-century technology kicking and screaming all the way. I’m surprised I wasn’t struck by lightning on the spot, but that’s what comes of having Generation X progeny. I had learned about text messaging the hard way-because my kids, Kelly and Scott, had insisted on it.
“Sure,” Ross said. “I’ll have Katie send it over to you.”
Katie Dunn was Ross’s Gen X secretary. Knowing Ross is even more of a wireless troglodyte than I am made me feel some better-more with it, as we used to say back in the day.
I had just stuffed the phone back into my pocket when the nurse led Kelly into the room.
“How are you?” she asked, concern written on her face. “Mel told us what happened and that you needed to take it easy for a while. Are you feeling any better?”
I swung my feet off the side of the bed and sat up slowly.
“Take it easy,” the nurse advised.
But the nap had done the trick. I was definitely feeling better. “I’m fine,” I said. “One hundred percent.”
“Mel went with Jeremy. He’s taking the kids back to the hotel,” Kelly explained. “She’ll help get them fed and make sure the babysitter arrangements hold up. If you’re still feeling up to having that dinner, that is.”
That was what Mel had told Kelly, of course. And that’s what she was doing, but only up to a point. The reasons she was doing those things were a whole lot murkier-to Kelly, at least, if not to me.
Kelly and I haven’t always been on the best of terms. In fact, we’ve usually not been on the best of terms. She had run away from home prior to high school graduation and managed to get herself knocked up. Her shotgun wedding had ended up being unavoidably delayed, so Kayla had arrived on the scene before her parents had ever tied the knot. I have always thought most of this Kelly-based uproar is deliberate.
Mel takes the position that it’s more complex than that-both conscious and not. She thinks Kelly’s ongoing rebellion has been a way for her to get back at her parents-at both Karen and me. Although I didn’t know about it at the time, Kelly was mad as hell at her mother for coming down with cancer and dying while Kelly was still in her teens, and she was mad as hell at me for having been drunk most of the time while she was growing up. And now she’s apparently mad at me for not being drunk. When it comes to kids, sometimes you just can’t win.
So Mel had designed this whole Disneyland adventure, complete with inviting my son and daughter-in-law, Scott and Cherisse, along for the ride, for no other reason than to see if she could help smooth out some of the emotional wrinkles between Kelly and me. So far so good. As far as I could tell, everyone seemed to be having a good time. There had been no cross words, at least none I had heard. And I suspected that was also why Mel had sent Kelly to drag me out of the infirmary.
“I should have gone on the teacups with her,” Kelly said as we walked toward the monorail. “Jeremy won’t set foot on one of those on a bet, but rides like that don’t bother me. They never have. And Kayla loves them so much. She rode the teacups three more times after you left. She didn’t want to ride on anything else.”
I stopped cold. Kelly turned back to look at me. “Are you all right?” she asked.
It took me a minute to figure out what to say. I now knew something about Kelly and her mother and her daughter, and it was something she didn’t know about me. As I said already, I was mostly AWOL when Kelly and Scott were little-drinking and/or working. Karen was the one who took them to soccer and T-ball and movies. She was also the one who “did the Puyallup” with them each fall. When it’s time for the Western Washington State Fair each September, that’s what they used to call it-“doing the Puyallup.” It was Karen instead of me who walked them through the displays of farm animals and baked goods; who taught them to love eating cotton candy and elephant ears; and who took them for rides on the midway.
“You’re just like your mother,” I said, over the lump that rose suddenly in my throat and made it difficult to speak. “And Kayla’s just like you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kelly asked. She sounded angry and defensive. It was so like her to take offense and to assume that whatever I said was somehow an underhanded criticism.
“Did your mother ever tell you about the first time I took her to the Puyallup?”
“No,” Kelly said. “She never did. Why?”
“She wanted to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl, and I knew if I did that, I’d be sick. Rides like that always make me sick. So I bought the tickets. Your mother and I stood in line, but when it came time to get on, I couldn’t do it. She ended up having to go on the ride with the people who were standing in line behind us. Here I was, supposedly this hotshot young guy with the beautiful girl on his arm, and all I could do was stand there like an idiot and wait for the ride to end and for her to get off. It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life. We never talked about it again afterward, but she never asked me to get on one of those rides again, either.”
Kelly was staring up into my face. She looked so much like her mother right then-was so much like her mother-that it was downright spooky. It turns out DNA is pretty amazing stuff.
“So why did you do it?” she asked.
Now I was lost. Yes, I had been telling Kelly the story, but her question caught me off guard. I didn’t know what “it” she was asking about.
“Do what?” I asked.
“If you already knew it would make you sick, why on earth did you get on the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party with Kayla?”
“I thought maybe I’d grown out of it?” I asked lamely.
Kelly shook her head as if to say I hadn’t yet stumbled on the right answer. “And?” she prompted.
“Because my granddaughter wanted me to?” I added.
The storm clouds that had washed across Kelly’s face vanished. She reached up, grabbed me around the neck, and kissed my cheek.
“Oh, Daddy,” she said with a laugh. “You’re such a dope, but I love you.”
See what I mean about Mel Soames? The woman is a genius.
CHAPTER 2
The call came in just after the morning briefing ended and as Sheriff Joanna Brady was about to tackle that day’s bushel basketful of paperwork.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Larry Kendrick, her lead dispatcher, had said. “We’ve had a call about a possible homicide north of Bowie at a place called Action Trail Adventures.”
“Never heard of it,” Joanna said.
“I’m not surprised. It’s an all-terrain vehicle hot spot. They keep a fairly low profile, probably to avoid coming up against planning and zoning restrictions. I’ve dispatched Detectives Carpenter and Howell to the scene, and I’ve asked Jeannine to send out an Animal Control officer. She has Natalie Wilson coming over from Willcox. She should be on the scene within the next twenty minutes or so.”
Ernie Carpenter was Joanna’s senior homicide detective, a guy who had put in his twenty years and was verging on being ready to pull the plug and put himself out to pasture. Debra Howell had been working homicide for the better part of two years, partnering with Ernie as often as possible as she gradually learned the ropes. Jeannine Phillips, on the other hand, was Joanna’s head of Animal Control. Animal Control had been stuffed into Joanna’s area of responsibility years earlier, supposedly on a temporary basis, which had now turned permanent. Natalie
