Long Time Gone jpb-17 Read online

  I noticed a subtle sudden change in the mother superior’s voice. It seemed younger somehow. Her words were now being delivered in the singsong staccato of a small child.

  Fred remained smoothly reassuring. “How old are you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Bonnie Jean Dunleavy.”

  “Have you started school yet, Bonnie Jean?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  If she’s not in school then, that makes her four or five years old, I wrote. Either 1949 or ’50.

  “What are you wearing?” Fred asked.

  Homicide detectives do the same thing with suspects. They ask indirect questions, thus creating a fabric of story. If the suspect tells lies, those spur-of-the-moment fibs will fall apart later under more detailed questioning. Here Fred’s indirect questions-ones that weren’t related to the troubling memory itself-allowed Mary Katherine to answer. But even this cautious, roundabout approach caused visible agitation. During earlier questioning Mary Katherine’s hands had rested at ease in her lap. Now, as Fred MacKinzie moved closer to dangerous territory, her hands moved fitfully about. Sometimes she tugged anxiously at the hem of her skirt or the sleeve of her sweater. Sometimes she covered her eyes as if shielding herself from something too awful to face.

  “A sundress,” she answered at last. This time she closed her eyes rather than shielding them. I wondered if shutting out her view of Freddy Mac’s office made it possible for her to see the dress she had worn so long ago. “A bright blue sundress with yellow sunflowers on it.”

  I scribbled into my notebook: Time of year is summer. Where?

  “What are you doing?” Fred asked.

  “I’m standing on a chair by the sink, looking out the window.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “My parents’ car.”

  “So they’re not there with you?”

  “No.”

  “Is anyone else there, a babysitter? A friend, perhaps?”

  “No. I’m alone.”

  “Alone and looking out the window?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you see?”

  Her eyes remained shut. “The sun is shining,” she said slowly. “I want to go outside and play, but I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Mama and Daddy won’t let me. I have to stay inside and wait until they come home.”

  “Where are they?”

  Sister Mary Katherine shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just out.”

  “What can you see through that window?”

  “Grass. And two driveways, ours and hers.”

  “Whose driveway?” Freddy asked.

  “I don’t know.” As Sister Mary Katherine delivered her answer, her body shifted uneasily in her chair. She squirmed in her seat like a little kid who has waited far too long to head for a rest room.

  “Can you tell me your neighbor’s name?” Fred asked.

  “No. I can’t talk about her at all.” Slumping in the chair, Sister Mary Katherine seemed close to tears. “Don’t you understand?” she pleaded. “I’m not allowed to talk about her. Ever. If I do, something bad will happen. Someone will hurt me.”

  I jotted down: Who’s going to hurt her?

  Fred was following the same track. “Who will hurt you, Bonnie Jean? Your father?”

  “No, not my father!” she said forcefully.

  Clearly the current line of questioning was so upsetting that Fred backed away from it for a time. “Tell me about your house,” he suggested.

  “It’s an apartment in a basement. It’s cold here even when the sun is shining.”

  “Who lives upstairs?”

  “A lady who’s old and sick. Mama looks after her, and she lets us stay here.”

  “Do you know the lady’s name?”

  “No, but I know she doesn’t like kids. That’s why I have to stay inside when Mama and Daddy are gone. So I don’t bother her. She might make us move out.”

  “Tell me about her house,” Fred said.

  “It’s old and big and it’s made out of brick.”

  “So it’s a nice house, then?”

  “I guess.”

  “And are there other children living nearby?”

  “I don’t know.”

  So she’s not in school yet. If she were, she’d know the other kids in the neighborhood.

  “Your mama looks after the lady upstairs. What does your daddy do?”

  “He works.”

  “What does he do?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Does he dress up when he goes to work?”

  “No. And he comes home all dirty. He has to shower before we can eat dinner.”

  “Let’s go back to the window for a moment. What time of day is it?”

  “Afternoon, I think.”

  “And if you could go outside, what would you do?”

  “Watch ants or play jacks or hopscotch or hide in my secret hiding place.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Around behind the shed.”

  “Who do you play jacks with?”

  In answer, Mary Katherine twisted her hands and shook her head.

  “The person you can’t talk about?”

  Mary Katherine nodded.

  We’re talking about a playmate then, I scribble into my notebook. But she just said she didn’t know any other children.

  “How old is this person you play jacks with?” Fred asked. “About the same age as you?”

  Sister Mary Katherine shook her head.

  “Older or younger?” Fred asked.

  “Older.”

  “How much older?” Fred persisted.

  I swear, the guy could have been a cop. Right down the line, he was asking the same questions I would have asked had I been there.

  Mary Katherine shrugged. “I dunno.”

  There was a long silence after that, as though Fred himself wasn’t quite sure where to turn next. Finally he said, “Bonnie Jean, do you ever play pretend?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What’s your favorite game of pretend?”

  “I pretend I’m a horse, running through the tall grass.”

  “Would you play a game of pretend with me right now?”

  “I guess.”

  “Okay, so let’s go back to that chair beside the window-the one you were standing on a little while ago.”

  Once again Sister Mary Katherine squirmed in her seat. “Please,” she said. “Don’t make me go back there.”

  “You won’t,” Fred assured her. “We’ll pretend there’s a camera instead of you standing on that chair. A movie camera. If the camera tells us what you see outside the window, the camera might get in trouble, but you won’t. Do you think that would work?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Let’s try it. If it gets too scary, we’ll stop, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Tell me about the chair. You said you were standing on it. How does that work?”

  “I pushed it up to the front of the sink.”

  “The kitchen sink?”

  “Yes. And then I climbed up on it.”

  “The chair or the sink?”

  “The chair. I had to lean across the sink to see out. I had to hold on to the windowsill to keep from falling.”

  “All right. Now we’re going to put a camera up there in exactly the same spot where you were. You won’t even have to be there. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Sister Mary Katherine’s voice was little more than a whisper.

  “Now you tell me. Is the camera in the same spot you were?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does the camera see?”

  “A car.”

  “Where?”

  “Coming up the driveway.”

  “Your driveway?”

  “No. Hers.”

  Need her to describe the car, I write. Make, model, year.

 
“What does the camera see next?”

  “The car stops and a man gets out.”

  “A passenger or the driver?”

  “Driver.”

  “Do you know this man? Is he someone you’ve seen before?”

  Sister Mary Katherine shrugged. “Maybe,” she said.

  “What does he do?”

  “He walks away from the car. He goes up to Mimi’s back porch and knocks on the door.”

  Mimi! I jot down. The name from the inscription in the book.

  “What happens then?”

  “She comes to the door. The camera can’t hear what the man’s saying, but it can see that he’s angry. He’s yelling at her.”

  “And then?”

  At that point, Sister Mary Katherine dissolved into frantic tears. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t want to see anymore. Don’t make me watch. Please.”

  Dismayed and relieved, I listened as Fred MacKinzie walked Sister Mary Katherine away from the edge of Bonnie Jean Dunleavy’s cliff of remembrance. He had been so close. I was frustrated that he hadn’t gone ahead, but the exhaustion and strain on Mary Katherine’s face when she emerged from the trance told me Fred had done the right thing. He’d managed to come up with a few nuggets of information. In situations like this, something is better than nothing.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked Sister Mary Katherine.

  “Okay,” she said. “But tired, very tired. Did you learn anything?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Do you remember someone named Mimi?”

  “Not right off the bat. You think my nightmare may have something to do with a person named Mimi?”

  Fred nodded.

  “Did I mention her last name?”

  “No.”

  Suddenly Mary Katherine’s face brightened. “Wait a minute. Now I do remember. There was a Mimi in my life. She gave me a book once-as a Christmas gift when I was just a little girl. I still have it.”

  “Where is it?”

  “On Whidbey. Why?”

  “Let’s take a look at it. Maybe there’ll be a clue in it that will tell us where it came from.”

  “Are we going to look at the tape now? Maybe if we look at it, it’ll trigger some additional memory for me.”

  “No,” Fred said. “Not right now. The memories you’re recalling under hypnosis seem to be totally devoid of contamination from the present. I think it’s best to keep it that way. If you remember spontaneously, then that’s another thing. It may mean that you’re coming to terms with your hidden nightmare without the need of another hypnotic trance, but seeing the tape of our session might precipitate your remembering something before your mind is ready to process it. Does that make sense?”

  Mary Katherine nodded. I had to agree, but not for the same reason. If the little girl had been an eyewitness to a murder, it was important to keep those memories separate from her present reality until we had mined them for all possible details.

  “What do we do next?”

  “We should schedule another session for next week,” Fred said. “We need to give you time in between. Can you come back then?”

  “If we’re going to get to the bottom of this, I suppose I’ll have to,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “What day works best for you?”

  Not interested in the appointment-making process, I punched “rewind” and prepared to watch the tape again. Before I could, however, the phone rang.

  “Mr. Beaumont?”

  I recognized the distinctive drawl that belonged to Jerome Grimes, Belltown Terrace’s most recent doorman.

  “It’s me, Jerome. What can I do for you?”

  “I got a guy down here by the name of Ron Peters. He’s wondering if it’s all right for him to come up and see you.”

  Belltown Terrace seems to run through doormen and resident managers with disturbing regularity. Had Jerome been a long-term employee, he might have remembered a time when Ron, his wife, Amy, and their three kids had all called Belltown Terrace home. I keep trying to tell the condo board that we need to pay our staff better so they’ll stay on longer. So far that idea has gone over with all the grace of a pregnant pole-vaulter.

  It takes a while for the building’s elevators to climb twenty-five stories from the lobby to my penthouse condo. I wouldn’t be living here or driving a Porsche if it hadn’t been for Anne Corley. That’s what makes it so tough. Her brief appearance in my life left me far better off financially and way worse off emotionally. I guess you could say Anne was, and is, both a blessing and a curse in my life.

  I left the door to my unit open and went out into the hallway to wait for Ron to emerge from the elevator. Actually, I was a little surprised that he would drop by without calling first. Years ago a work-related accident left him a paraplegic. Getting himself in and out of his wheelchair and the chair in and out of his Camry isn’t an easy task.

  Eventually the elevator doors opened to reveal him sitting inside. As soon as I saw his face, I knew something was wrong.

  “It’s Rosemary,” he said at once. “She’s dead.”

  Rosemary was Ron’s ex-wife. She had been gone from Ron’s life long before I ever met him. One night while he was working the graveyard shift at Seattle PD, Rosemary had split the scene, taking their two young daughters, Tracy and Heather, along for the ride. The three of them had ended up living on some far-out, pot-growing commune in the wilds of eastern Oregon. With the help of Ralph Ames, my friend and attorney, Ron eventually managed to extricate the girls from their wayward mother’s indifferent care, leaving her in a sort of drug-induced free fall. The last I remembered hearing about Rosemary Peters had been several years earlier. She had been headed into treatment and was trying to get her life in order.

  “I’m so sorry, Ron,” I said, and meant it. “What happened? Did she OD?”

  Ron shook his head. “She was murdered,” he said. “Somebody shot her.” Grasping the wheels of his chair, he pushed away from the elevators and headed for my unit. I followed him inside and closed the door.

  “When?” I asked, sounding like a newspaper reporter looking for those elusive four Ws. “Where?”

  “Sometime over the weekend,” he said. “Down in Tacoma. They found her body by the water yesterday. It took until today for them to identify her. Two Tacoma homicide detectives came by the office a little while ago to let me know. Oh, God, Beau. What the hell am I going to tell the girls?”

  The girls. Heather and Tracy. They’re fifteen and seventeen now, but whenever I hear their names without having them right there in front of me, I always picture them the way they were the first day I saw them. Once Ralph Ames had enlisted in Ron’s custody battle, I watched from the sidelines while the attorney worked what I would later come to realize was his customary magic. First Ralph managed to convince a judge to grant Ron full custody of the two girls. Court order in hand, Ralph had flown down to Pendleton, Oregon, and personally retrieved Heather and Tracy from the commune where they had been living.

  Ron and I were waiting at the airport when their flight landed at Sea-Tac. Ralph came off the Jetway leading Tracy with one hand and packing Heather on his other hip. I had first met Ralph when he showed up in Seattle as Anne’s attorney, and he’s the kind of guy you love to hate. No matter what, his trousers are always properly creased, his hair is always neatly in place, and his ties are usually spotless. Not that day, though. For the first and only time in my life I saw him looking frazzled and disheveled. Single-handedly looking after the girls had taken its toll on both him and his clothing. His expensive yellow tie was marred by a long dark dribble of chocolate, but with Heather nestled up under his chin, he seemed totally unconcerned about the un-sightly, and no doubt permanent, stain.

  Heather and Tracy wormed their way into my heart that day, just as they had into Ralph’s. And that was permanent, too, all these years later.

  “You just come straight out and tell them,” I advised Ron. “They’re sensible, smart girls. You and Amy have done a great job raisin
g them. They’ll be able to handle the news.”

  I sat down in the recliner so Ron and I would be on the same level. He looked totally distraught-more so than I would have expected given the fact that he and Rosemary had been divorced for the better part of fourteen years.

  “Look,” I said. “I know what it’s like when an ex-spouse dies. I’ve been there, remember? Divorces are all about the bad times, but when somebody dies, the good times resurface. They come back to bite you in the butt when you least expect it.”

  “The divorce wasn’t exactly over,” Ron said bleakly.

  “What do you mean?” I demanded. “Wasn’t I the best man when you and Amy got married?”

  “Rosemary was trying to regain custody,” he answered. “Of Heather. Tracy’s close enough to her eighteenth birthday that it’s not really an issue for her, but Rosemary claimed that since I’ve had Heather all to myself for so long, she wanted some time with her as well.”

  “When did all this come about?” I asked. “The last I heard, Rosemary was just out of jail and was going into a drug-treatment facility. Was she clean and sober then?”

  “That’s all a matter of opinion,” he replied. “Whenever she got involved in something, she always went overboard. While she was in treatment, she hooked up with this religious group, and she dove into that the same way she dove into drugs. It’s called Bread of Life Mission. They operate soup kitchens for the down-and-out all over the country. Rosemary ended up managing one for them. It’s down near the Tacoma Dome, corner of Fifth and Puyallup. She lived in an apartment over the storefront.”

  I thought of the nice home on Queen Anne Hill in which Ron and Amy Peters were raising their three children-Tracy, Heather, and Jared Beaumont Peters-a cute little guy who happens to be my namesake and who’s already charming the socks off the little girls in his kindergarten class.

  “Surely Rosemary didn’t expect Heather to go live there, did she?” I demanded.

  “As a matter of fact she did,” Ron replied. “In a run-down building that backs up to the railroad tracks and with drug-using bums lined up outside day and night.”

  “Sounds like the perfect place to raise a precocious, headstrong teenager,” I said. “If you want her to turn into a druggie, too, that is.”

  “That’s exactly what I told Rosemary on Friday,” Ron said. “And I told her I’d see her in hell first.”