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  "So why not take some time off? See if you can schedule vacation for all next week," he suggested. "That way, if it's possible to bring Kelly around, you'll have more time to make it work. If you drive down today and come right back tomorrow, you'll be under a tremendous amount of pressure. So will she."

  "And what if I can't make it work?" I growled, tweaked by Ralph's irritating and unreasonable reasonableness.

  "Look on the bright side," Ralph returned cheerfully. "That way, you'll be there in time for the wedding."

  Count on Ralph to discover some remote silver lining.

  "Whatever you decide," he continued, "I'm still planning on coming to Seattle tomorrow. Let me know if there's anything I can do. And say hello to Alex for me when you see her."

  "Right," I said. "She's the next person on my list to call. I'll give her your regards."

  I waited until I was seated in my leather recliner and drinking coffee before I dialed Alexis Downey's number. Middle-aged dating is hell. First you have to sort through what's out there to see if there's anyone you like who might possibly like you back. Do that, and things become even more complicated.

  In the past two months, I had discovered a good deal to like about Alexis Downey. There were also more than a few stumbling blocks-a major one being her huge, man-hating tabby cat named Hector. Another is her bed.

  Alex prefers to sleep on one of those crazy futon things, which she folds up into an unusable couch by day and turns into an equally uncomfortable bed by night. She insists my king-size Posturepedic mattress hurts her back. So we spend time together, quite a bit of it, actually-fun, enjoyable time-but one or the other of us is always creeping home to our respective beds in the middle of the night. From a neutral-mattress perspective, a trip to Ashland might have been fun, but not now, not with Kelly living there.

  Once I had Alex on the phone, I tried explaining to her exactly why I was on my way to Ashland by myself, why a joint trip seemed totally out of the question. At least to me.

  Alexis Downey had her own thoughts on the matter. "Like hell," she declared heatedly. "If you're going, so am I."

  "But what will I tell Kelly about you?" I asked.

  "What do you think you'll tell her? Your sex life is none of Kelly's damn business, that's what. How soon are we leaving?"

  After years of Fuller Brush training, I recognize assumed closes when I hear them even though I'm not always quick-footed enough to dodge out of the way. Alexis didn't ask whether or not she was invited. All she wanted was an estimated time of departure so she'd know how long she had to pack.

  "Can you be ready in forty-five minutes?" I returned.

  "No problem. I'll farm Hector out with Helen upstairs. Then I'll call my friend Denver down in Ashland and get her working on rustling us up a room and some play tickets. At the last minute, tickets may be damned hard to come by."

  "Denver?" I said. "You have a girlfriend named Denver?"

  "Denver Holloway. Didn't I ever tell you about her? She's directing at the Festival this year. If anybody can get rush tickets, she can."

  Advancing age has increased my ability to give in gracefully. "I'll be there at eight o'clock sharp," I told her.

  After that I called Sergeant Watkins, the desk sergeant on the homicide squad, and filled him in. Watty wasn't thrilled by my last-minute scheduling of vacation time, but he understood. He and I share the misfortune of being fathers to troublesome adolescent daughters. His youngest had married some two months earlier. Watty was well aware that I'd been worried about Kelly. He was one of the few people at the department who knew I'd hired a private eye.

  "Good luck on straightening Kelly out," he told me, "but I'm betting you won't be able to change her mind one iota. As far as I'm concerned, boys are a hell of a lot easier to raise. With boys, you only have to worry about one penis. With girls, you have to worry about all of them."

  His helpful, fatherly comment didn't improve my frame of mind. "Thanks for all the encouragement, Watty. I needed that."

  I could hear him grinning into the telephone. "Always glad to be of service," he said.

  I slammed down the receiver.

  The Automobile Association of America says it's a ten-hour drive from Seattle to Ashland averaging fifty miles an hour. I didn't drive Triple A's recommended fifty. I threw a hastily packed suitcase into the 928, gassed up, and collected Alex from her condo on Queen Anne Hill at eight on the dot. Once on I-5, I tucked the Guard-red Porsche in with the crush of fast-moving southbound traffic and stayed in the middle of the pack.

  Fortunately, Alexis Downey isn't a backseat driver. She doesn't have to get out of the car every mile or two, either. With short but necessary pit stops in Portland and Roseburg, we turned off the freeway into Ashland at 4:45 that afternoon.

  As we headed south, steady rain gradually gave way first to drizzle and then to occasional showers. While we were passing through the Siskiyous, partly cloudy blue skies appeared overhead. By Medford, it was full-fledged summer, but I didn't notice. I was far too distracted to enjoy what should have been a pleasant, scenic drive. Preoccupied with thoughts about Kelly, I'm sure I wasn't much of a travel companion to Alex.

  Kelly had been missing from home for almost four months. I should have been overjoyed that Dave had located her. But I'm a cop in what I call the Nasty Nineties. I've seen what happens to runaways who take to living on the streets for even as short a period of time as a few weeks. I've witnessed the heartbreaking aftermath when anxious parents, thinking they're getting their kid back, come downtown to pick up the pieces. Or else to identify a body. With all the stuff that's out on the streets now-drugs, AIDS, herpes, gang warfare-even if the kid isn't dead, what the parents get back isn't the same person who left home a few days or weeks or months earlier.

  Fortunately, Alex is a very patient woman. For most of the way, she left me alone, but finally even she could no longer tolerate the thick, oppressive silence.

  "Have you decided what to do?" she asked.

  "Murder's out," I replied glumly, "for professional reasons if nothing else."

  She laughed. "No. Seriously, Beau, what options do you have?"

  "How about offering him a bribe, sort of a reverse dowry? Maybe Jeremy Todd whatever-his-name-is has heard through the grapevine that I'm supposed to be loaded. It wouldn't surprise me if he's only in it for the money. Kelly has lousy taste in men."

  "Getting married isn't exactly the end of the world," Alex argued. "Some of the people I went to school with got married right after high school and are still married to each other. Some of them even seem to be happy."

  "He's an actor," I said.

  "So? Actors are people, too. Besides, what makes you think he's so awful? You haven't met him yet. If he's working for the Festival, he must have something on the ball."

  "Being a part-time actor isn't much of a recommendation for a bridegroom," I retorted. "Not much at all."

  In downtown Ashland, Alexis hopped out at a stoplight on the main drag, promising to call me on the cellular phone as soon as she knew for sure where we were staying. Despite all the No Vacancy signs we'd seen along the way, she seemed certain that we wouldn't be forced to sleep on the street. In the meantime, I went off on a solitary hunt for Live Oak Lane. Ashland isn't very big, and I figured if I drove around some, I was bound to stumble across it. Finding it might have been easier if I'd broken down and picked up a map.

  The tourist guidebooks all say that Ashland is a lovely, picturesque place. Quaint, I believe, is the operative word. The shady tree-lined streets showcase prosperous-looking, newly rehabilitated but authentically Victorian houses of the gingerbread variety. Most of the bigger ones seem to have been converted into bed-and-breakfast establishments.

  To an outsider, although there were lots of cars parked on the downtown streets, the whole place seemed almost deserted. Then, suddenly, at five o'clock and for no apparent reason, I found myself stuck in the middle of a traffic jam while the sidewalks bustled with hurrying
pedestrians. That's when I finally gave up, played against gender stereotyping, and stopped at a gas station to ask directions.

  "Oh," the attendant said. "You mean the coop. It's not in town at all. It's out in the county on the old Live Oak Farm. A bunch of actors live out there. Cheap rent and all."

  It sounded like a damn commune to me. Straight out of the sixties. All the more reason to want Kelly out of there and back home in California where she belonged. Surely, she'd listen to reason, wouldn't she?

  Don't bet on it, buster, I told myself sternly. Why would she? After all, she never had before.

  CHAPTER 2

  Following the attendant's detailed directions, I drove out through the end of town, under a freeway, and past a golf course. In the process, as distracted as I was, I couldn't help noticing that this quiet corner of southern Oregon is beautiful country.

  The town of Ashland is nestled in a broad valley only a few miles north of the California border. June in Seattle usually carries on gray, rainy, and cold. Here, the atmosphere had a California feel to it-dry and airy. The sky was a clear, untroubled blue.

  With the onset of early summer heat, lush grassland had turned gold in sharp contrast to the fringe of the steep oak-and pine-covered hilltops that formed the valley's border. In one fenced field, a single cow stretched her neck to crop scarce but reachable leaves from a few low-hanging branches. That explained why the trees had such a uniform, trimmed appearance. They all looked as if they were subject to constant, loving pruning, and they were-with hungry live-stock doing the trimming rather than people.

  I turned off the blacktop of a well-maintained county road onto what the sign said was Live Oak Lane. The word "Lane" vastly overstated the case. Live Oak Rut would have been closer to the truth. Some of the potholes were deep enough that I worried about the well-being of my low-slung Porsche. Luckily, I didn't have far to go. The kid at the gas station had assured me that once I made it to Live Oak, I wouldn't miss the house, since the road dead-ended just past Live Oak Farm.

  At first glance, when I saw the house winking at me through a grove of trees, I was surprised. Expecting a disreputable, run-down shack, I glimpsed instead an enormous two-story farmhouse. The place probably dated from back in the days of large families when hard-pressed farmers had homegrown all the kids they could manage. Then as now, kids had meant mouths to feed, but back then they had been a steady source of unpaid labor as well. They provided the extra hands to gather in the crops and get all the chores done. Back then kids had meant survival, not hassle.

  As I bounced toward it, I wondered how many kids growing up in that old house had longed to run away from it, to escape dull country life for the excitement of the city. Any city. Now that very same house was a haven-a place to run to-for my city-bred daughter. More of Mrs. Reeder's miserable irony.

  Eventually, the road turned and crossed a cattle guard. On a leaning fence post dangled a bullet-marred sign saying LIVE OAK FARM. Behind the sign stood a junkyard full of wrecked cars. Another rutted track, this one far narrower and rougher than the first, wound off through the cars toward the house.

  The Porsche thumped noisily over a bumpy set of metal rails embedded in the roadway. As I picked my way between potholes, I tried to glance up now and then to get my bearings. Derelict cars-rusted-out wrecks in various stages of decay-stood parked in haphazard rows that meandered off in either direction. Doors sagged open on broken hinges, and ambitious, sun-loving weeds grew up through the shattered windshields and cracked floorboards.

  The newest model I recognized was a once-dashing '67 Chrysler New Yorker. The flattened roof and caved-in sides testified that the car had rolled over more than once on its way to this isolated auto graveyard. It was easy to assume that sometime in the seventies whoever had been running the wrecking yard had exhausted his supply of money or enthusiasm or both.

  The track turned sharply as I passed the Chrysler. Coming around the corner, I could see that the New Yorker's broad bench seat had been pried loose from the car and positioned on the far side of the vehicle, possibly as someone's idea of low-cost yard furniture.

  A young woman, clad in an almost nonexistent bikini, lay on this open-air tanning bench, soaking up some rays and seemingly oblivious to the sun-rotted foam leaking out of the seat beneath her. It crossed my mind that the sun was probably doing the same kind of damage to her skin that it had already done to the car seat, but I didn't bother stopping to point that out. At that stage of life, kids are immortal-in their eyes, anyway.

  Beyond the cars and closer to the house, I drove past the grim remains of a recently blown-down barn. Only three feet or so of roof line were still visible above the pile of weather-beaten, termite-ridden wood. The shattered barn made me dread what I'd find once the house came under closer scrutiny, but my worries proved groundless.

  When I was close enough to see it in detail, I noticed that indeed the exterior of the house was as mottled and spotty as a Dalmatian dog, but not from rotting wood or peeling paint that had been left to its own devices. Instead, someone was systematically scraping the old paint off, from the topmost gable of the slate-gray roof to the old-fashioned columns on the broad front porch. A line of newly repainted but not-yet-reinstalled shutters marched in close formation across the front exterior wall.

  One sagging corner of the porch had been propped back up and was being held in place by a strategically positioned hydraulic scissors jack. Several uncut lengths of eight-by-twelve lumber lay nearby and were probably intended for permanently shoring up the porch. Another neat stack of two-by-twelves and two-by-fours testified to someone's intention of framing a new set of steps from ground level up to the spacious front deck.

  Obviously, someone was hard at work refurbishing the old place. That should have made me feel better, but somehow I couldn't see how Kelly could abandon her comfortable, upscale California nest with her mother and stepfather for this aging Gothic kind of work-in-progress. But still, taking on a complicated renovation project shows a certain amount of initiative, organization, and skill. For the first time, I wondered if maybe the people Kelly was staying with were reasonably okay after all.

  I stopped the car, got out, and then found myself stymied. The lumber to rebuild the steps was there, but in the meantime, the stairs themselves were missing altogether. I wondered how visitors were supposed to get close enough to the front door to knock or ring the bell.

  Standing only a foot or so away from the porch, I was busy contemplating my predicament when an ugly, gangly yellow dog of indeterminate line-age rose stiff-legged from behind a wooden porch swing. Barking hoarsely, he hobbled toward me. I worried momentarily that the dog might leap off the porch and come after me, but when he got close enough, I could see he was far too old and frail. He stared at me blindly through eyes clouded with cataracts. It seemed to take all the strength he could muster to keep up his croaking but ineffectual bark.

  Eventually, the screen door slammed open behind the dog, and a woman marched out onto the porch. "What is it, Sunshine?"

  At first I thought the woman was being sarcastic and talking to me, but then I realized she was actually speaking to the dog. She strode over to the edge of the porch, leaned down, and patted the dog soothingly. "It's okay, Sunshine girl," she crooned. "I'm right here."

  So Sunshine was a girl. With a strange dog, it's hard to tell that kind of thing from a distance. The woman caught sight of me and frowned, first at me and then at my shiny red Porsche. Since she was so much higher than I was, she appeared to be a giant. Not necessarily a friendly one, either.

  "Who are you?" she demanded coldly. "What do you want?"

  "My name's Beaumont," I said. "I understand my daughter lives here."

  I'm not a particularly good judge of women's ages. She could have been anywhere from her late forties to her early sixties. Her hair, mostly gray, was parted in the middle, braided, and then pulled into some kind of knot at the back of her neck. Wearing boots, jeans, and a man's old dress sh
irt rolled up to the elbows, she stood on the porch with her arms crossed, staring down at me with the afternoon sun playing off the even planes of her spare, angular features.

  I'm not a weight lifter, but I recognize muscle definition when I see it. Since the woman's forearms had plenty of muscle definition, it was safe to assume the rest of her did, too.

  "Really. Kelly didn't mention she was expecting visitors," the woman remarked with a coldness that was only one step short of sending me packing.

  I wondered what I'd done to merit such open hostility. Before saying anything more, I studied the woman closely. Her face was tan, but without the leathery look that comes from too many years of unrelenting sun. Everything about her was plain except for her eyes. They were a startling shade of violet that hardened to a flinty gray while she gazed down at me.

  "It's a surprise," I answered, trying to keep things light. "I was in the neighborhood and thought I'd stop by."

  "I'll just bet," the woman returned, not bothering to mute her biting sarcasm.

  It wasn't going at all well. If this woman was the designated keeper of the co-op's gate, then I would have to find some way around her if I wanted to speak to Kelly.

  "Look," I said, drawing myself up to a full-attention stance. "If you'd just tell my daughter I'm here…"

  Eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations are just that. The first person to blink loses. My damn car phone rang just then. I lost the glare-down fair and square.

  "You'd better go answer your high-priced toy," she jeered.

  Trying to maintain my somewhat damaged dignity, I turned and stalked back to the car. Naturally, my caller was Alex. "Did you find Kelly?" she asked.

  "I think so."

  "You're not sure?"

  "Not exactly. I haven't seen her yet. Give me a break, Alex. I just now got here. What gives?"

  "Denver found us a room at a place called the Oak Hill Bed-and-Breakfast. We've got tickets to Romeo and Juliet in the Bowmer Theatre tonight and to the opening of Taming of the Shrew in the Elizabethan tomorrow. Denver's going to try to get us in to see The Majestic Kid at the Black Swan tomorrow afternoon, and she's invited us to dinner tonight. Meet us in the dining room at the Mark Anthony at six."