Page 3 of Den of Iniquity

Chapter 2

Bellingham, Washington

Friday, February 14, 2020

I removed Sarah’s leash and let her loose in the house. Then I took off my jacket and hung it up. When I turned back toward Kyle, I found he had walked through both the kitchen and dining room and was standing in front of the west-facing windows, staring out at Bellingham Bay. Cloud cover was rolling in, and the water had gone from bright blue to gray.

“What is it, Kyle?” I asked, following him into the living room and taking a seat. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” he said, suddenly bursting into tears. “I want to come live with you and Grandma Mel, please.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa! In those few words, he delivered way too much information accompanied by zero useful context.

“Why?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

He shuddered and sank down onto the sofa. “Mom and Dad are getting a divorce,” he managed after a long pause.

Floored, I took a seat, too. Twenty years ago when I’d helped plan and oversee Jeremy and Kelly’s quickie wedding, I’d had serious doubts about their potential for long-term marital bliss, but in the two decades since, I’d seen no signs of discord. When Mel and I were around them, everything seemed fine. There had been none of the usual sniping and bickering that often surfaces when a marriage is coming apart at the seams.

A thousand questions raced through my head, but I stifled them. Years of conducting interviews with witnesses and suspects in homicide cases has taught me the finer points about when to ask questions and when to keep quiet. This was one of the latter. I allowed the silence to linger for the better part of a minute before I finally spoke again.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

Kyle looked up at me with eyes filled with anguish. “Dad’s got a girlfriend,” he managed. “Another girlfriend, that is, only this one’s pregnant. Her name is Caroline Richards. When everything blew up, Mom quit her job with the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and moved to Eugene. She’s got a new job with the alumni association at the University of Oregon. She and Kayla have an apartment together. I was supposed to stay on with Dad in Ashland to finish out my senior year, but I don’t want to, not with Caroline living there. If I can’t stay here with you and Grandma Mel, I’ll go live in a homeless camp somewhere. I saw plenty of those on the drive up.”

Whoa again! Needing a moment to take it all in, I stood up. “I think I’ll fix myself a cup of coffee. Care for one?”

“I’d rather have a Coke.”

“Coming right up,” I said.

The coffee machine had turned itself off while Sarah and I had been out walking. I put it through the warmup cycle, brought Kyle a Coke, and then went back to the kitchen counter to wait for my coffee to brew, mentally picking apart the bombshell that had just landed in my lap.

With regard to Jeremy’s girlfriend, the wordanotherwas the most important. That meant the affair with Caroline wasn’t his first extramarital offense. And I was all too aware that this wasn’t his first out-of-wedlock pregnancy, either. I vividly remembered his and Kelly’s hastily arranged shotgun wedding because I was the one who did most of the arranging. But if this current crisis had been going on long enough for Kelly to find a new job and move out of the house and into an apartment with Kyle’s sister, why the hell hadn’t Mel and I heard even so much as a peep about it?

And maybe this was nothing but history repeating itself. After all, at age seventeen Kelly had dropped out of high school, run away, and gotten knocked up by her boyfriend. Karen and I had divorced years earlier, but bottom line, our divorce had been the ultimate reason Kelly had left home. And now, with Kyle’s life in shambles, he seemed to be doing the same thing—running away. Hopefully he hadn’t left behind some girl who was also in a family way.

Mel and I had seen Kyle off and on over the years, but those were always holiday group events with everyone present and accounted for. The number of times the two of us had ever had a heart-to-heart about anything of substance was exactly zero. Discussing who won the latest Husky/Duck matchup counts as so much empty BS. It’s verbal camouflage pretending to be a meaningful conversation. In other words, Kyle and I weren’t total strangers, but we certainly weren’t close.

As for taking in a grandchild on a permanent basis? Are you kidding? Mel and I had established a very comfortable, uncomplicated existence with just the two of us. Adding an eighteen-year-old male into the mix of our placid way of life was likely to upend everything. Why would we want to do that? Why would anybody? But then I remembered a guy named Alan Dale.

Back in my rowdier drinking days, I’d indulged in more than a few one-night stands, one of which had resulted in an unexpected pregnancy. The woman involved, Jasmine Day, never let on about the baby she named Naomi. Jasmine and Alan Dale, her future boyfriend and eventual husband, had raised the child together without my being any the wiser. As far as Alan was concerned, Naomi was his daughter. After Jasmine’s death, Naomi had found her way to Seattle, but if she’d even known about me, she’d made no effort to find me. Instead, she hooked up with a guy her age and got pregnant. Somewhere during the pregnancy the boyfriend disappeared, leaving Naomi to believe she’d been abandoned. When the baby was born, Naomi did the same thing—she abandoned Athena, her drug-addicted newborn, in the neonatal nursery of the hospital.

Once Alan Dale got wind of what was going on, he had come riding to Athena’s rescue by putting himself on the first available commercial flight to Seattle. It was Alan, not Naomi, who spent night after night in the nursery, rocking Athena through the agonies of drug withdrawal. Once she was finally released from the hospital, he was the one who took her home with him, while he began navigating the tangle of legal hurdles required to keep Athena from falling into the quagmire of foster care. He had come to me for help with that.

Unsurprisingly, sorting it out had taken longer than either of us anticipated. Eventually, however, we made it work, and Alan wasable to take Athena back home to Jasper, Texas. In the meantime, my first wolfie, Lucy, had fallen in love with Athena, which is how I ended up losing her. Once Lucy met Athena, it was love at first sight. When Athena went home to Texas, so did Lucy.

If Alan Dale was man enough to tackle raising a newborn on his own, couldn’t Mel and I tough it out with a high school senior? At least Kyle wasn’t in diapers. According to the latest report from Alan, Athena was currently navigating the intricacies of potty training. We wouldn’t be dealing with that, either. Besides, by the time fall came around, Kyle would most likely be heading off to college. Having given myself a stern talking-to and making certain mental adjustments, I headed back into the living room with my coffee in hand.

“Obviously I’ll need to talk this over with Mel,” I told him as I took a seat.

Kyle nodded. “I understand,” he said.

“I doubt very much that you’ll end up living in a homeless camp,” I continued, “but if you want to stay here, you’re going to have to clue me in about what’s been going on at home. Do your folks even know where you are? Did you tell them where you were going? Did you leave them a note?”

Kyle shook his head. “I didn’t tell them anything. I just left.”

“You have to call them and let them know where you are.”

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