J. Jance - Long Time Gone

“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 raising 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.