Just then Mimi made a strange, gurgling sound. The woman looked down at her briefly. Then she glanced at Mimi’s back door and again at Bonnie, who was still backing across the yard as fast as her short little legs would carry her.
“You’d better get the hell out of here then,” the woman snarled. “And if you say a word about this to anyone, he’ll do the same thing to you, understand?”
At that, Bonnie turned and fled. She ran as fast as she could, past the door into the apartment and around to the back of the house, where she ducked into her favorite hiding place, a small passage between a crumbling toolshed and an overgrown hedge. She crouched there in the mud gasping for breath while her heart thumped wildly in her chest. She cried for a while, but then, afraid the man and woman might be looking for her and hear her sobs, she fell quiet and listened-for what seemed like a long, long time. At last she heard the sound of car doors slamming. Moments later, the big red car nosed slowly past the front of the house. Only then did Bonnie creep out of her hiding place.
She tiptoed around the end of the house, back to the side yards and to the place where she had seen Mimi lying in a pool of her own blood. Mimi was gone, and so was the blood. The sidewalk at the bottom of the porch was wet, as though someone had hosed it off.
For a few moments, Bonnie stood staring at Mimi’s back door, wondering if Mimi was inside and if she was okay. But Bonnie didn’t go up the steps and knock on the door. It was getting late. Her parents would be home soon. She didn’t want them to find her outside.
She hurried back into the downstairs apartment. Once she was inside, she looked down and saw that her dress was splattered with mud and blood. Mimi’s blood. If Mama saw that, she’d want to know how it got there. Next would come the switch or the belt. Bonnie was convinced that if she told anyone what had happened-even Mama and Daddy-she was sure the man who had hurt Mimi would find out about it and come looking for her.
So Bonnie took her dress off. She washed her hands and face and knees, and then she changed into a clean dress. She rolled up the ruined one as small as she could make it. She was standing in the kitchen looking for a place to hide it when she heard the sound of her parents’ car pulling up outside. Desperate, she shoved the dress as far as she could into the space between the back of the refrigerator and the wall.
Seconds later, Mama and Daddy came in the door. They were laughing and smiling and having a good time. Daddy came over, picked Bonnie up, and swung her around the room.
“There you are,” he said. “Have you been a good girl?”
“Yes, Daddy,” she told him. “I’ve been a very good girl.”
He put her back down on the floor and pulled a Tootsie Roll out of his shirt pocket. “That’s for being good then,” he said.
Tootsie Rolls were by far Bonnie’s favorite candy. Instead of tearing the paper off and biting into it, she held the paper-wrapped candy in her hand and stared at it.
“What do you say?” Mama asked.
“Thank you,” Bonnie murmured.
“Well,” Daddy asked. “Are you going to eat it or not?”
So she did. Under her parents’ watchful eyes, Bonnie unwrapped the candy and managed to choke down that Tootsie Roll. It was the last one she ever ate. From then on, the very idea of that soft, chewy chocolate reminded her of something that was too awful to think about or remember.
Over the years Bonnie forgot all about her friend Mimi lying there in the spreading pool of her own blood, but she never forgot that the very act of biting into a Tootsie Roll had the power to make her physically ill.
CHAPTER 1
Anyone who is dumb enough to live on one side of Lake Washington and work on the other is automatically doomed to spend lots of time stuck in bridge traffic. Such was the case one January morning as I headed for my job as an investigator for the Washington State Attorney’s Special Homicide Investigation Team, known fondly to all of us who work there by that unfortunate moniker, the SHIT squad.
I live in Belltown Terrace, a condo at the upper end of Second Avenue in downtown Seattle. My office is sixteen miles away in a south Bellevue neighborhood called Eastgate. That morning’s commute was hampered by two separate phenomena, both of which were related to a mid-January blast of arctic air that had come swooping down on western Washington from the Gulf of Alaska. The first traffic hazard was black ice, which had turned most of the minor side streets into skating rinks. Unfortunately, I’m a world-class procrastinator, and the winter weather had snuck up on me while my Porsche 928 was still decked out in summer-performance tires.
The other major traffic hazard was mountains-not driving over them, but seeing them. For nine months of the year, the mountains around Seattle are mostly invisible. Hidden by cloud cover, they sit there minding their own business, but when the “mountains are out,” as we say around here, and Mount Rainier emerges in all its snow-clad splendor, trouble is bound to follow. Unwary drivers, entranced by the unaccustomed view, slam into the fenders of the cars in front of them, and traffic comes to a dead stop. The frigid air had left the snowcapped mountains vividly beautiful against a clear blue sky. As a result, I-90 was littered with pieces of scattered sheet metal, chrome-trim pieces, and speeding tow trucks.
Between ice-and gawker-related accidents, my normal twenty-minute commute had turned into an hour-long endurance test. Adding insult to injury was the fact that this was my first morning back at work after a weeklong stay in Hawaii.
You’ll notice I said stay, not vacation, because it wasn’t. I was there as father of the groom. Anyone who’s been down that road knows it’s no cakewalk.
The wedding had come up suddenly when Scott telephoned the day after Christmas to say that he and Cherisse were giving up their long-planned, no-holds-barred, late-summer extravaganza of a wedding in favor of a hastily arranged and low-key affair that would take place on a private beach near Waikiki the second week in January. As plans for the summer wedding had burgeoned out of control, I had been less than thrilled about the way things were going. A low-attendance affair that would consist of bride and groom, best people, and an assortment of parental units was much more to my liking.
I did wonder briefly if a misstep in birth-control planning had accounted for this sudden change in plans. That certainly had been the case when I had masterminded my daughter’s hasty marriage to her husband, Jeremy. Now, several years and 1.6 kids later, Kelly and Jeremy were doing just fine, and I had no doubt Scott and Cherisse would do the same. So I rented a tux, booked my hotel room and plane tickets, and was on my way. I didn’t find out that I was wrong about the unwed pregnancy bit until after I checked into my hotel room outside Honolulu.
I had just finished stowing my luggage when Dave Livingston stopped by my room to give me the real story.
Dave, by the way, is my first wife’s second husband and her official widower. He’s also Scott’s stepfather and a hell of a nice guy. Right after Karen died, Dave and I both made an extra effort to get along-for the kids’ sake. It may have been a phony act to begin with, but over time it’s turned real enough. As far as parental units go, Dave and I are all Scott Beaumont has. Dave had flown in from L.A. the night before and had eaten dinner with Cherisse’s folks, Helene and Pierre Madrigal, who had arrived on a flight from France the previous day.
There are a number of things I didn’t learn about Dave Livingston until the occasion of Scott’s wedding. For one thing, he speaks French. I have no idea why an accountant from Southern California would be, or would even need to be, fluent in French, but he was and is. In the course of that initial dinner he had sussed out that Pierre, age fifty-seven, had recently been diagnosed with a recurrence of prostate cancer. He and his wife had decided to postpone his next round of treatment until after the wedding. This bit of bad news no doubt accounted for the sudden change in wedding plans, and rightly so. In my opinion, postponing cancer treatment for any reason is never a good idea. Scott and Cherisse were obviously concerned that by summertime his condition might have deteriorated to the point where traveling to their wedding would be impossible.