up.”
I studied Erin warily. She was treading dangerously close to the edge, her story sketchy and difficult to follow.
“You’re satisfied that this is a fictitious birth certificate?”
She nodded. I had heard through the grapevine that Caleb Winthrop Drachman, much like Ralph Ames, was no slouch when it came to getting things done regardless of regular office hours or bureaucratic red tape. And again like Ralph, international boundaries were not necessarily a problem. I had no doubt that his verification or lack of it was accurate.
“But what made you think to have someone check, Erin? Most people take their birth certificate’s word for it. You didn’t come up with that idea all on your own. Did Max tell you to do it?”
“No. The phone call.”
“What phone call?”
“At first I thought it was the regular kind of call we’ve been getting, people calling to tell us how sorry they are, that kind of thing. This woman asked for me by name, so I thought it was someone who knew us, probably some friend of my mother’s from work. Except it wasn’t.”
“Who was it?” I asked.
Erin paused and took a deep breath. “I don’t know. As soon as she knew it was me on the phone, she said that she knew who I really was and then she started laughing, and she wouldn’t stop.”
“She laughed?”
“You should have heard her. But between times, she would say things. Like she said that if I was smart, I’d check out my birth certificate. I asked her what was wrong with it, and she said that was for her to know and for me to find out, and then she laughed some more.”
Pete Kelsey had mentioned something about a laughing telephone caller, too. As I recalled, the person who had given him the wonderful news about his wife and Andrea Stovall had laughed like hell the whole time she was lowering the boom. What was going on?
“Was that all?”
“No. Not exactly.” Erin paused, her eyes meeting mine, and a new urgency came into her voice. “She said that she had a message for Pete Kelsey. For me to tell him that he hadn’t lost everything, not yet, but that he would and that when he did, it would be…”
“Would be what?”
“I’m trying to remember her exact words. ”Payment in kind. That’s it.“
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know, Detective Beaumont,” Erin said. “Do you?”
I shook my head.
Erin shivered again, holding her arms close to her body. “If you could have heard the way she said it…It was like listening to an icicle. Or a knife. She wasn’t laughing anymore, not then. It was a threat, and it scared me to death. I mean, my father may have done something wrong, but I’m afraid for him. I’m really afraid. He’s all I have left.”
For the first time in the whole process, I was afraid, too.
“Did you recognize the voice?”
“No.”
“So what did you do then, after you got off the phone?”
“What would you do? After what Max had just finished telling Grandma and Grandpa and me? I wanted to know for sure, to find out for myself, so I got out the birth certificate. Dad always keeps his important papers in the rolltop desk in his study. It looked all right to me, but I decided to call the hospital and check. They wouldn’t tell me anything, so then I called Mr. Drachman. I already told you what he found out.”
“Does he know you’re talking to me?”
Erin shook her head. “No. In fact, he told me not to, said that whoever it was couldn’t hurt my dad as long as he was in custody, but Mr. Drachman didn’t hear her,” Erin said. “He didn’t hear the way she sounded.”
By then, Erin’s teeth had begun chattering so badly she could hardly talk.
“How about a glass of warm milk?” I suggested. “Maybe that would help.”
Tears came to her eyes. “That’s what my mother used to give me, but yes, I’d like that.”
When the waitress brought the steaming cup, Erin held the thick white mug between her hands as if hoping to leach some of the heat out of it.
“Tell me about my father,” she said.
“I will, but first, let me ask you this. What time did you leave for Eugene on Sunday?”
“Right after lunch. Around one or one-thirty. Why?”
“Did you go straight there?”
“We stopped once for a break in Woodland, at the Oak Tree. That’s about halfway.”
“Did you say ”we‘?“ I asked, sitting up and taking notice. It hadn’t occurred to me before that Erin might have an alibi.
“Yes. My roommate was with me. Her name’s JoAnne McGuire. Why?”
“Your father didn’t mention you had a rider.”
“He probably forgot JoAnne was riding along. Her parents live in Tacoma, so I picked her up on the way down I-5. Dad never even saw her.”
“What time did you get into Eugene?”
“Almost nine. There was a big eight-car pileup on the freeway in Portland, and that held us up for quite a while. By the time we made it back to our apartment, they said on the radio that it was snowing hard in Portland, so we were just barely ahead of the worst of the storm.”
If that was the case, it would have been impossible for Erin to reappear in Seattle two or three hours later. It didn’t make sense.
“How can I get in touch with this roommate of yours?”
Erin jotted a number on a piece of paper from her purse and shoved it across the table toward me. “I’m sure she’ll be at the funeral tomorrow if you want…”
Suddenly the anguished look returned to Erin’s face. “Wait. Will my father be there too, Detective Beaumont? At the funeral? Mr. Drachman said he might be.”
“He might,” I agreed, “but I can’t tell for sure yet. Why?”
“I know Grandma and Grandpa want him there desperately, but I don’t. I don’t ever want to see him again. What would I say? How could I face him? If he lied to me about who he is, he must have lied to my mother as well. And why should this woman on the phone know more about me than I know myself?”
“Does your father have any enemies?”
“No,” she answered quickly, but then her eyes misted over again. “But then, what do I know about it? Nothing, nothing at all.”
She set the cup down and leaned back into the bench. I knew she was exhausted, and my heart went out to her. Possible killer or not, right then Erin Kelsey was far too worn out to be a danger to me or to anyone else.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you home.”
But she shook her head stubbornly, defiantly, as though the milk had somehow revived her and given back some of her spunk. “Oh no, you don’t. You said you’d tell me about my father.”
“I thought Maxwell Cole already told you.”
“Uncle Max is a friend. He didn’t want to tell us any more than he absolutely had to. You’re not a friend, Detective Beaumont. You’re a cop, and I want to know the truth. What did my father do? It must have been something terrible, something awful, for him to hide out all these Years. Tell me. I’ve got a right to know.”
“I can’t tell you any more than Max did,” I told her.
“Why not?”
“Because I haven’t been able to find out anything else. According to what we’ve been able to piece together so far, your father was a smart kid who went off first to West Point and then to Vietnam. At some point in time, something snapped and he made up his mind to never go home again. His own parents died in South Dakota years later without ever knowing for sure whether their son was dead or alive.”
“So he lied to them too?”
