office hers alone. If that’s not crazy, I don’t know what is.”
“I don’t know either, Mrs. Stovall, but let me sleep on it, and I’ll be back in touch with you tomorrow. Will you be coming down for the funeral?”
“Should I?”
“No,” I said. “I can’t order you to stay away, but I think it could be dangerous for you if you showed up.”
“That’s what I thought too,” Andrea Stovall conceded. “At the time of the funeral tomorrow, I think I’ll just go out on the beach here and say good-bye privately. That would probably be better for all concerned, don’t you think?”
“By all means.”
The next time the PAUSE button clicked, I let the much-interrupted messages continue playing. The next five were all from Erin Kelsey.
They started calmly enough with a very business-like: “This is Erin Kelsey. Uncle Max just left. Please give us a call as soon as you can. We’d all like to talk to you about it.”
The second message sounded a little more urgent, more uptight: “Erin again. Grandma and Grandpa had to leave. They wanted me to come home with them and spend the night, but I told them I wanted to wait here for your call.”
By the third message, she was in tears, mumbling, difficult to understand. “Detective Beaumont, please call me back no matter how late you get in. I’ve got to talk to you right away.”
In the fourth, her voice was empty and hollow, “Me again,” and the fifth a desperate plea. “Please call me back. Please!”
When I dialed the number, she answered before the end of the first ring. “Detective Beaumont?” She sounded frantic.
“Yes, Erin, it’s me. What’s wrong?”
“I’ve got to talk to you. Right now. Tonight. Where can I meet you?”
“Erin, tell me what’s wrong.”
It was hard to connect that young, wretchedly distraught voice with the personality of a killer, but I couldn’t afford to ignore Jason Ragsdale’s eyewitness warning. In my own best interests-and in hers as well-I had to assume that Erin Kelsey was both dangerous and unpredictable.
She paused, drawing a ragged breath. “Everything’s wrong, Detective Beaumont. My life is wrong. My mother is dead, my father is in jail for killing her. I don’t understand it. I want somebody to explain it to me. I want somebody to tell me what’s going on. Maybe I’m going crazy. Is that possible?” She ended the series of questions with an uncontrollable sob.
Unfortunately, if what Jason Ragsdale had told me was the truth, insanity was one of the few ideas that made absolute sense. While Erin continued to weep into the phone, I tried to strategize.
I’ve learned a few hard lessons over the years. One of the toughest is that, for me personally, a damsel in distress usually proves to be a one way ticket to disaster. This time, for a change, I paid attention and refused to blunder in where angels fear to tread.
“Erin,” I asked. “Do you have a car there at your house?”
“A what?” she asked, sniffling.
“A car. Transportation. Can you drive somewhere and meet me?”
“No. My car’s still in Eugene. The police towed Mom’s Volvo away, and I haven’t seen Daddy’s Eagle anywhere. Can’t you come here?”
“No,” I told her firmly, “I can’t,” although “won’t” was a whole lot closer to the truth.
“Call a cab then,” I continued. “Do you know the Doghouse Restaurant at Seventh and Bell?”
“I think I can find it. I’ve been there before a couple of times, after football games.”
“The cabbie will know where it is even if you don’t. Meet me there in fifteen minutes.”
“What if I can’t get a taxi that fast?”
“Get there as soon as you can. I’ll wait.”
For the second time that evening, I headed out into the night.
Chapter 25
I was seated halfway down the wall when Erin Kelsey rushed headlong into the restaurant. Once inside, she paused uncertainly and glanced around the room before catching sight of me and hurrying toward my booth.
If anything, she looked far worse than she had sounded on the phone. Her hair was pulled back into a ragged, disheveled braid of some kind. The yellowish light in the restaurant is never flattering to anybody, but her face, contorted by emotion, looked downright ravaged.
I made a quick strategic evaluation as she came closer. She was wearing jeans and a bulky, sheepskin-lined jacket, which she made no move to take off. Over her shoulder dangled a good-sized purse. Both of those factors meant that concealed weapons were a definite possibility. I kept my guard up.
“Can I get you something?” I asked as she slid into the booth opposite me. “Coffee, tea-a drink?”
She shook her head. “No. Just water.”
I kicked myself then, remembering Max’s description of Erin as a devout Mormon. But even at the time, the irony of the thought struck me. Devout? If Erin followed the rules about what she could and couldn’t drink, wouldn’t she also follow some of the others as well, some of the more important ones like “Thou shalt not kill,” and “Honor thy father and mother”? Maybe Erin Kelsey was one of those people who scrupulously obeys all the little rules and ignores the big ones.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell which she was, and both our lives hung in the balance of my making the right choice. I needed information.
“What’s the matter, Erin?” I asked, trying to sound calm and reassuring, trying to win her confidence.
She shuddered and made a supreme effort to pull herself together.
“Who am I, Detective Beaumont?”
“What do you mean who are you?”
“You know what I mean, and don’t pretend you don’t. Uncle Max told us tonight that you’re the one who found out Kelsey isn’t my father’s real name. So if his name isn’t real, that means mine isn’t either.”
“Erin, what Max told you is true. Your father had evidently lived under an assumed name the whole time you’ve been growing up, but…”
“And why do other people know so much more about me than I do myself?” she interrupted.
Without warning, she opened her purse and reached inside. I readied my body to repel an attack, but instead of a weapon, she withdrew a long, narrow envelope and sent it spinning across the table toward me. I managed to grasp it in midair like some errant Frisbee before it could sail all the way to the floor.
“What’s this?”
“Look at it,” she ordered.
I did. It was a birth certificate. Erin Kelsey’s birth certificate, saying she’d been born in St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada, to a couple named Peter B. and Carol Ann Kelsey.
“What about it?”
A flood of tears overflowed the long lashes and coursed down her cheeks. “It’s a fake,” she mumbled almost incoherently. “It’s nothing but a fake.”
“A fake? How can that be?”
“I don’t know how. All I know is that it is.”
“And how did you find that out?”
“Mr. Drachman. He told me earlier tonight that if he could do anything at all to help, I shouldn’t hesitate to call, so I did. He said he had a friend or two in Toronto, and maybe they could do something even though it wasn’t regular office hours.”
“And he did?”
Erin nodded. “According to the records in Toronto, no Erin Kelsey was born in St. Michael’s Hospital. I don’t even exist. Maybe I’m a figment of my imagination.” She giggled, almost hysterically. “I must have made myself
