On the way into town, I think Ardith had clung to the faint hope that the body they were going to see wouldn’t be Rachel’s. On the way back to Packwood, knowing the worst, she seemed intent on starting to put together a plan for finding a coffin and holding services.
“You won’t be able to do that right away,” I cautioned. “King County will most likely send someone to pick up the body today, but the autopsy won’t be until tomorrow at the very earliest. You won’t be able to make plans for a funeral until after the M.E. releases the body.”
“So by the beginning of the week, then?” Ardith asked.
“I can’t say for sure,” I said. “I know it’s tough to be stuck in limbo like that, but that’s the way it is.”
For the trip back, with Mel driving her own vehicle, Kenny had taken my front passenger seat while Ardith rode in the back. After that exchange about funeral arrangements, Ardith fell silent. Eventually Kenny glanced back at her.
“She’s asleep,” he said. “Neither one of us slept last night-at all. Ardy blames herself, you know, for being too hard on Rachel and driving her away. That’s probably true.”
“What do you mean?”
Kenny shrugged. “I think Ardy looked at Rachel and saw too much of herself when she was that age. She didn’t want her daughter to make the same mistakes she had, but the more Ardy tried to rein Rachel in, the wilder she got.”
“What about you?” I asked. “What did you think about Rachel?”
“I didn’t grow up the way Ardy did,” he said. “It seemed to me that Rachel was just a regular kid. I kept trying to tell Ardy that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”
“That’s why you let her go on that overnight on Sunday?” I asked.
He nodded bleakly. “It was just supposed to be that one night.” He fell silent, too, and spent the next twenty minutes weeping silently. I gave the guy credit for doing his crying when his wife was asleep. I also understood the real reason for his tears. Yes, Rachel was dead, but that was only part of it. Ardith may have been blaming herself for her daughter’s fate, but Kenny Broward was doing the same thing-drowning in blame.
I understood exactly how it had all come about. He and Ardith had been playing good cop/bad cop with Rachel Camber. Unfortunately for all concerned, in this case both cops had lost.
Kenny finally managed to get it together and decided to tell me the rest of the story. “Ardy found money hidden in Rachel’s drawer along with that business card, and it wasn’t the first time, either. That first time she left it there so Rachel wouldn’t know we were snooping.
“How much money?” I asked.
“Eight hundred dollars,” Kenny said.
“That’s a lot of money for a kid to have stowed away.”
Ken nodded miserably in agreement.
“Rachel wanted to go to cheerleader camp next month. One week costs a thousand bucks. We told her we didn’t have that kind of money lying around. We’re making ends meet, but just barely. I think she was saving up for that.”
That meant that Rachel had amassed an additional four hundred bucks to go with the four hundred Ardith had already mentioned. “But a total of eight hundred dollars?” I asked. “Where do you suppose she would get that kind of money?”
Kenny shrugged. “Ardy seemed to think Rachel was putting out, like a prostitute or something.”
“What about you?”
He shrugged hopelessly. “Drug dealing, maybe? That would make sense, but if she was really running away, why didn’t she take the money with her?”
“Probably a lack of trust,” I suggested. “I’d say Rachel knew the people she was going to be with on Sunday afternoon, and she was worried they might steal whatever she brought along with her.”
There was a long period of silence after that while ten miles or so of blacktop unwound itself between opposing banks of towering evergreens.
“Will we get her stuff back?” Kenny asked finally.
“What stuff?” I asked.
“Nothing valuable,” he said. “I was hoping we’d be able to give her a class ring next year. That’s not going to happen, but she did have a bracelet.”
When he first said it, what popped into my head was a charm-bracelet kind of thing-gold or silver with lots of little dangly thingies on it. My daughter, Kelly, had one of those once, but Kenny Broward soon disabused me of that notion.
“It’s an elephant-hair bracelet,” he said. “It looks a lot like the wire we used to hang my dad’s dropped ceiling. It has a little sliding fastener on it so you can make it bigger or smaller.”
“Elephant hair?” I repeated.
“An exchange student from South Africa came to school here last year,” Kenny explained. “Her name was Estelle. She and Rachel became good friends. At the end of the year, when it was time for Estelle to go back home, she gave Rachel a bracelet made out of elephant hair and made her promise to wear it every day. She did, too.”
I had an idea that the elephant-hair bracelet in question was now lying somewhere on the muddy bottom of the retention pond, but I didn’t say as much to Kenny.
“Anything that was found with the body will be inventoried and returned to the family unless it’s considered to be evidence of some kind.”
“All right,” he said. Then he shook his head again. “I guess I need to try to let Estelle know.”
“She probably has e-mail,” I said. “Try asking Conrad Philips. He’ll know how to get in touch with her.”
Ardith was awake again by the time we got to their house in Packwood. The yard was still parked full with people waiting to hear the bad news and to help the Browards cope with it. I knew Mel was right behind me. She’d execute the search warrant, then interview all these folks to see if anyone knew anything. In the meantime, I dropped off my passengers and headed right back out.
I pulled off the freeway in Centralia because I needed to buy gas. By the time I finished filling the tank, it was lunchtime and the call of that Country Cousin fried chicken was more than I could resist. I went inside and drew the same waitress who had served Mel’s and my breakfasts.
The chicken comes with a fresh salad, a dollop of mashed potatoes, and a stack of green beans. The salad includes a layer of tiny cubes of steamed beets. Back when I was growing up, my mother had to threaten me with bodily harm to get me to eat steamed beets. She’d be astonished if she knew I now eat them voluntarily.
The drawback on Country Cousin fried chicken is that it takes time to cook-a full half hour. I occupied my time by opening my computer, logging on, and checking my e-mail. The first e-mail on the list was the one from Beaumont, Texas-the one from my presumed cousin, the one I hadn’t replied to yet. I scrolled past that one. At the bottom of a long string of Viagra ads was one from Dr. Mowat, or, rather, LWMowatME, according to his e-mail address. The message itself was short if not sweet.
It did my heart good to know that Ross Connors’s dislike of Larry Mowat wasn’t the least bit unrequited. It’s sort of a waste when one person hates another one’s guts and the first guy doesn’t get it.
As far as I was concerned, I had my own opinions about good old Larry. In fact, I was so happy to avoid talking to him about the Deeson autopsy that I spent twenty minutes of my chicken-waiting half hour tracking down Captain Hoyt’s telephone number. I wondered what kind of approach I’d need to make in order to glean any usable information. Those concerns turned out to be unfounded.
“I’ve been expecting your call,” she said. “Ross Connors told me you’d be in touch. What do you need?”
“To know everything you know about Josh Deeson’s autopsy.”
“I don’t have the official report,” she said. “All I have right now is what Mowat told me. Cause of death is plain old asphyxiation,” she said. “Definitely suicide. No initial sign of drug use of any kind, which is fairly unusual in these cases. Kids who decide to end it all often turn out to be the ones who’ve already screwed up their bodies and their futures with some pretty obvious substance abuse.”
