J. Jance - A more perfect union

He rose and came around the desk, stopping in front of me with his arms crossed, nodding his head sadly. "I'm afraid it was. Angie Dixon was one of our newer apprentices. A most unfortunate circumstance, but then nobody ever said working iron wasn't dangerous."

Green motioned toward the broken window. "Actually, the guy who was in here just a few minutes ago, Don Kaplan, I think maybe you met him last night. He's the one who's in charge of our apprenticeship program. He's taking Angie's death real hard. Personally, I guess you could say."

Martin Green moved away from the desk and led me to the door. "Watch your step," he cautioned as I started across the jagged shards of glass. "I wouldn't want you to slip and fall. Kim, is someone going to clean this mess up?"

The woman who had let me into his office nodded. "I've called maintenance, Mr. Green," she answered. "A janitor is on the way." Something about the speed of her response, her quick retreat to the safety of her typewriter made me suspect Martin Green wasn't an altogether easy man to work for.

I stopped beside the counter and turned back to where he was still standing in the layer of broken glass. "By the way," I said. "Thanks for the champagne last night. I didn't mean to crash your party."

He waved. "Think nothing of it," he replied absently. With that, he turned and disappeared back into his office, closing the shattered door behind him while the two secretaries exchanged discreet looks of undisguised relief.

I left the Labor Temple with the feeling that my mission had been totally successful from a property management point of view. I had gotten Martin Green off the backs of the Belltown Terrace management group and made sure the Bentley wouldn't cause us any more adverse publicity. Green was willing to let bygones be bygones, and so were we.

In addition, I had discovered that Don Kaplan, someone I knew, if only slightly, was a person I could talk to in order to learn more about the ironworker apprenticeship program. How I'd go about it and under what pretext were details I hadn't quite handled yet, but at least I knew who to ask.

When I got back home there was a message on the answering machine from Margie, my clerk down at the department. The message said to give her a call.

"What are you doing, working on your vacation?" Margie asked.

"What makes you think that?"

She laughed. "Easy. I've got a message here for you from Gloria over at the phone company. She says the address you need is 24 Pe Ell Star Route. Where's that?"

"Beats me. Down around Raymond somewhere, I think."

"That's a little outside the city limits, isn't it?" Margie asked.

She was teasing me, and I knew what she was thinking. Cops do it all the time, use official channels to get the address or phone number of someone they've met and want to see again. It isn't legal, but it does happen.

"Leave me alone," I said. "Anything else?"

"As a matter of fact, there is one more message. It's from Big Al. He wants to know when you're going to stop farting around and come back to work."

"Tell him Tuesday, and not a minute before."

"Will do," she answered with a barely suppressed giggle. "He misses you."

Once I was off the phone, I dragged my worn Rand McNally Road Atlas off the bookshelf. It was several years out of date, but I suspected the only real difference would be in a few freeway interchanges. The rural roads, especially ones running through little burgs like Pe Ell, would be essentially unchanged.

The town was right where I thought it would be, about twenty-five miles off Interstate 5 between Chehalis and Raymond on Highway 6. I had never been there, had never wanted to go there, but I was going nevertheless.

By noon, I was on the freeway, headed south. Traffic was fairly heavy as out-of-state recreational vehicles lumbered home toward Oregon, California, and points south and east. There weren't any log trucks, though. The lack of rain had turned Washington's lush forests tinder-dry and shut down the woods to logging and camping both.

As I drove, I tried tuning in the radio. I heard a snippet of news reporting a fatal fire somewhere on the east side of Lake Washington. I switched the dial. I wanted music, not news. I was on vacation, out of town. Whatever was on the news wasn't my problem.

Highway 6 turned off at Chehalis and meandered west through wooded hills. Sometimes it ran under trees so thick they formed an impenetrable green canopy over the roadway. Other times it moved along near the bed of the shallow headwaters of the Chehalis River. I stopped at a wide spot in the road, a hamlet called Doty, to buy a soda and ask directions.

"Where does Pe Ell Star Route start?" I asked the woman clerk as she gave me my change.

"Just the other side of town," she answered, eyeing me suspiciously. "How come you wanna know? Lookin' for somebody in partic'lar?"

"A friend of mine from Seattle," I said. "She just moved down here."

"You must mean that crazy lady with the two little kids. Yeah, she's up the road here apiece-five, six miles or so. It's a blue house on the left. You can't miss it. Looks more like a jail than the real one does over in Chehalis."

I puzzled over that remark, but only until I saw the house. It was easy to find. The house, just across the road from the river, was nestled back against the bottom of a steep, timber-covered bluff. It was small, as two-story houses go. All the windows and doors on the lower floor had been covered with ornamental iron bars. It did indeed look like a jail.

A beat-up Datsun station wagon was parked near the house. On one side, two children were playing under a towering apple tree. A little girl sat in a swing with her hair flying behind her, while a boy, somewhat older, pushed her high enough to run underneath the swing when it reached its highest point.

I drove all the way past the house once, then made a U-turn and came back from the other direction. As I pulled into the driveway behind the Datsun, the little boy grabbed the rope and stopped the swing so abruptly the little girl almost pitched out on her face. He grabbed her by one arm to keep her from falling and pulled her down from the swing.

Stepping out of the car, I called across to them. "Hello there. Is your mother home?"

The little girl opened her mouth as if to answer, but the boy yanked on her arm and dragged her toward the house.

"Wait a minute," I said. "I just need to ask you a couple of questions."

Without a backward glance, the two of them scurried away from me like a pair of frightened wild animals, with the boy urgently tugging the girl along beside him. I paused long enough to look toward the house. An upstairs curtain fluttered as though someone behind it had been watching us.

I closed the car door and started after the children. When I rounded the end of the house, I expected to see them there, but they weren't. The back porch was empty. I stepped up onto the porch and tugged at the iron grillwork over the door. It was still securely fastened from the inside. That puzzled me. I didn't think the children would have had enough time to get inside the house and relock the door.

Just then I heard what sounded like a door slamming shut on the backside of the house, the side closest to the steep bluff behind it. I walked around the corner and looked, expecting to find an additional outside entrance. Instead, the only thing I could see was a rectangular box built next to the foundation of the house. The top of the box was a full-sized wooden door. The door itself was slightly ajar, resting on an empty metal padlock hasp that had been closed inside.

Was this the door I had heard slam, or was there another one, farther around toward the front of the house? I walked around to the front door. It too was protected by a formidable grillwork cover, the kind that give fire fighters nightmares. I tested the bars. They had been carefully welded and solidly set by someone who knew what he was doing.