Tina reached for the envelope and Bonnie handed it over.
"Look, I'm going up to see Dylan and I need your support. I've been there for you, haven't I? When you had problems with your car, who picked you up and drove you to the grocery store?"
"That's hardly the same thing," Bonnie sniffed. "We're talking about hanging out at a jail, not going to Safeway's frozen-food aisle."
Tina giggled. "Come on," she said. "It'll be so fun"
"I can see it will be fun for you. But what do I get out of it?"
"Lunch at the new restaurant ... and better yet, you get to live vicariously through me"
The last words almost made Bonnie cry. She'd lived vicariously through Tina Winston for most of her adult life. But the promise of the advertised ninety-nine-item salad bar won out over her good sense and bruised ego.
"Okay. Okay. I'll go with you"
Tina flashed her disarming smile. "You won't regret it," she said. "I promise."
The jail trusty was a man in his fifties who had practically made a second home of the Whatcom County Jail. He'd never done anything that sent him up to Washington's prisons in Walla Walla, Monroe, McNeil Island, or Shelton. He was what the jail called the ultimate boomerang. In time, he was known merely as Boomer, a name that was laughable considering his rail-thin frame. Sticks or even Humpback would have been more apropos. He pushed a metal librarystyle cart with the day's mail from one cell to the next, passing out love letters, legal missives, and even the penny shopper.
"Want this magazine?" He said to a hollow-eyed kid in on a drug possession charge, a misdemeanor.
The kid accepted the rolled-up magazine, a copy of Discover. "Hell no, I don't like that shit. Science kept me from my GED. Besides, isn't that a federal offense?"
"Huh?" Boomer said, his cart now squarely in front of the punk's cell.
The kid poked the magazine back through the bars. "Giving out someone's mail, man?"
Boomer let out big laugh. "What are they going to do? Send me to jail?" The kid had set him up with a joke. Nice.
"All that shit for Walker?" The kid pointed to a bloated canvas bag resting on the bottom shelf of the cart.
Boomer nodded. "Yeah, Mr. Hollywood gets more fan mail than that twink Tom Cruise. Sends out more than anyone here, too. Should probably have a personal postmark by now. Maybe even a stamp with his mug on it?"
The kid did his best to look cool and tough. He was neither. "Yeah, you lick the back of it and die."
Halfway down the corridor, Dylan Walker could hear the exchange between the trusty and the young inmate. It didn't make him angry, though if he was in closer range and he thought Boomer and the punk knew he heard them, he'd have put up some kind of a fight. But not then. Instead, he hurried to finish the letter he was writing. But he was neat. He didn't like to rush. Every stroke held some kind of power.
... I long for a friendship with someone like you. I've added your name to the visitation list. If you come, please tell them you are a lifelong friend.
Peace, Dylan Walker
By the time Boomer arrived at Walker's holding cell, he had finished addressing the envelope. He wanted it to get out in the day's mail. The letter was addressed to a woman in Acton, California.
"Here you go, Boomer," Walker said, his smile reflecting the dim light of the buzzing fluorescent tubes that hung from ceiling chains over the corridor. "Just ten to go out today. I'm behind." He laughed a little and handed over a stack of letters, envelopes of varying sizes, postage affixed by the senders in response to the jail's request for self-addressed, stamped envelopes for inmate mail.
Boomer opened the canvas bag and started feeding mail to Walker. "If you thought you were behind before, meet your future bout with writer's cramp"
Walker beamed as letter after letter was passed through the bars.
"This is stupid," he said. "You should just give me the damn bag"
"You know the rules. They consider you a suicide risk. The drawstrings might be too tempting for a guy like you"
"Tempting? Why would I ever want to hurt myself? I've never felt more wanted in my life." He topped off his revelation with a big smile.
I'll bet you do, you psycho, Boomer thought. Instead he said, "That's it for today. Better get busy. The mail train from Seattle's running tonight. You're getting another load tomorrow, hot stuff."
Chapter Twenty-two
Friday, 2:26 eni., Cherrystone, Washington
Emily knew the name, Angel's Nest, because it had been in the news intermittently when she was a student at the University of Washington in the early 1980s. In the almost twenty years since then, she hadn't given it a single thought. She turned on the teakettle and waited for the whistle. Angels Nest. What was that all about? Cary had said it was a "blast from the past." She remembered that the agency had been in the news. There had been some kind of scandal. When the boiling water rumbled, and then whistled, she dropped a bag of chamomile and a squeeze of honey from a plastic teddy bear bottle into a cup. Steam rose up from the spout as she poured. Everything that could be wrong, was just that, wrong. She was still jittery and angry at Cary, heartbroken that Jenna wouldn't just come home, and a wreck over the whole idea that she didn't know her daughter as well as she thought she had. How could she have been so blind? How can they seem so close one day, and the next be separated by a triple homicide? Herbal tea, something her mother pre scribed for everything from a broken date to a hysterectomy, sounded good.
She sipped it from the cup Jenna had painted at the Ceramic Castle; orange poppies spun around the rim. She was unsure exactly what had been the source of the agency's troubles. She'd called David to see if he remembered anything, but she got his answering machine-his voice sounding puffed up and all-important, even when he wasn't there to speak. She left a message. Next she did a quick search of the Internet, which only turned up the scantest of information. Angel's Nest was an adoption agency shut down in the mid-1980s over charges that its president had not only misappropriated funds but also somehow snipped through government regulations when it brought babies into the country. One woman from Tacoma even had to give her baby back.
But how would Nick Martin have been involved with this agency, anyway?
Taking her steaming cup down the hall to her office, Emily lingered in the doorway of Jenna's bedroom. Her old bedroom. The screensaver on the Mac was a digital aquarium with a pair of pink kissing Gouramis doing what they did best, over and over. Emily flopped herself on the pineapplepost bed, patting the pink-and-yellow quilt her grandmother had made. Memories of her daughter flooded the room. She could smell Jenna's Vanilla Fields perfume, a gift from Shali that Christmas. Over the bed was a framed print of The Little Mermaid, a souvenir from a trip to Disneyland. Beanie Babies left over from the long-abandoned collecting craze took refuge on a shelf. A purple Princess Diana teddy bear was the prize, a plastic "tag protector" dangled from its paw. So innocent then. All of us were. Jenna was smart. She was capable. She cared about doing the right thing. Emily sat still, breathing in her daughter, then went to her office and sat in front of her computer.
You'll be home soon, she thought. I'll never be too busy to listen.
The screen snapped to life and she typed in the web address for a Seattle daily paper and clicked on the link for the archives. She typed in "Angel's Nest," hit Search, and two small items popped up. One was a brief mention in a column, quoting a detective who had worked a homicide case that had tangential ties to Angel's Nest. The other was an item that indicated that all the assets seized by the government had been dispersed at auction, five years after the scandal. Emily thought there would be more; it had seemed like a bigger story. She searched again, but nothing more came up. It was then that she noticed the archives only went back to 1990.