My mood was already toast. "No, that will come in a few minutes when you tell me how wrong I am for suspecting anything."

He smiled weakly. "Aw, c'mon. Give me a chance here. I might even say you have a point."

I poured myself some coffee and sat down in the living room armchair, where I proceeded to tell Ray all about my encounter with Frankie Collins the day before. Of course I also had to give him the background information on the kid from talking to his mom a couple times. I did leave out the little shoving match the two of us had at Christian Friends over a week ago. None of the rest of it impressed Fernandez, though.

By the time I finished he looked a bit sour and his coffee cup appeared to be mostly empty. He still waved away the offer of a refill. "Okay, you were right. I'm not going to tell you that you have a point. You have a son. What kind of stuff did he say at thirteen to sound tough?"

"Certainly he didn't offer threats of murder, at least not in my hearing."

"Now, look. If what you've told me is accurate, Frankie didn't threaten murder, either. There are lots of ways to 'take care of' somebody you don't like besides killing them. He's an angry kid who has a lot of good reasons to be angry. Let's leave it at that. Meanwhile I need to leave to prepare for court this afternoon."

"For this case or another one?"

Ray scowled. "This one. That hot-shot lawyer Ms. Adams got Seavers has made a motion to get the charges down to suspicions of manslaughter and get his client released on his own recognizance because he's such a low flight risk."

"Hey, you were the one who said you didn't think Matt was a murderer."

"That was before the evidence techs found his handprint on an inside wall of that portable facility, right where you'd expect to see it if somebody pulled a heavy object, like a body, in there."

Lexy had been right in her a.s.sumptions, but this still made me mad. "Ray, that handprint could be from any time since they put that thing in the driveway. How can that one thing make you change your mind so radically?"

He gave me a look much like the one Ben usually gave me when he thought I was being denser than usual. It wasn't any more attractive or less annoying on Fernandez. "I'm not changing my mind that much. Seavers has been a person of interest ever since we knew how his girlfriend was involved. And now on top of everything else I have to worry about him getting out of jail and being back on the streets."

"As much as I want to see that happen, now I'm afraid he'll be in more danger out than in," I told him.

"Why? Because you heard a thirteen-year-old boy shooting off his mouth? Maybe you and that church group of yours can find a way to pray over both of them and make the situation go away." He pushed off the couch and left me to jump up and follow him to my own front door. "But if you'll excuse me, I still need to prepare for that hearing in Ventura."

He turned around when he got to the doorway. The speed of the motion almost made me run into him. "If you have any information like this again, please just call."

"As if I'd bother," I muttered after the door shut and I could hear him descending the stairs.

"Was that Detective Fernandez? What did he want?" Ben asked as he put the phone back in its cradle.

"Not much. What did your dad want?"

"To change the dates I'm going to be in Memphis, moving my flight up to Thursday instead of Friday. He, uh, wants me to meet somebody."

Oh, boy. The sheepish look on Ben's face gave me a clue as to what kind of "somebody" that might be. I just hoped that this time the "somebody" would be a little more serious, for Ben's sake, and maybe even be old enough that no one would mistake her for his older sister. Given Hal's taste in women, that last part might be too much to hope for. Not that I'd say that to Ben. "So does that work for you?"

"Pretty much," he said. "They cut into my planned time with Cai Li, but otherwise it's okay. You already planned for me to be gone anyway. I figure a day earlier wouldn't matter much."

"True." I'd be lonely without him, but technically it was Hal's year to have Ben for Christmas. If my ex-husband had a serious love interest at this point, he'd be even more anxious to start his time with Ben. Chances are good that Hal had actually changed the tickets last week sometime, before even asking his son. "How do you feel about all this?"

"What? Do you mean the changed date or spending Christmas with Dad and the Tennessee Grands?" When Ben put it that way, Hal's family sounded like a bad country band.

"Both. I imagine you were more anxious to go to Memphis before you had a girlfriend. And I know you enjoy spending time with your dad."

"A lot more than I like spending time with his parents sometimes." Ben sighed. "Do you think Grandma and Grandpa will ever get tired of showing each other up with money?"

"I'd like to think so, Ben, but I'm not sure that's going to happen. They were doing that before you were even born, so I certainly can't promise you that it's going to end anytime soon." It probably wouldn't end until one or the other of Hal's parents died. Even then whoever went first would be at a disadvantage because the last man-or woman-standing would have a chance at a better bequest to Hal or Ben. But for now I didn't want to dwell on all that stuff. "Do you think you'll shave before you fly out there?"

Ben grinned, making him look more like his father than ever. Whatever bad I could say about Hal, he'd been a very handsome young man and his son was no different. "Shave? No way. If I shaved, Grandma Lillian might ask me about my grades and school and if I have a job and all kinds of stuff like that. If I don't, all we'll talk about is this." He stroked his chin. So Ben was not only as handsome as his father, but he was even craftier. I'm going to have to keep an eye on that kid.

By four that afternoon I had gotten mighty antsy, wondering how the court hearing had gone for Matt. I hoped he wouldn't be spending this week before Christmas in jail. I didn't dare call Ray to find out, even though the information would be a matter of public record. None of the other Christian Friends were likely to know this soon, and I had no idea whether I could call the county courthouse and get information like that or not.

I'd cleaned up around the apartment and used up what excess energy I could by wrapping and mailing my mom's Christmas package. The line at the post office was incredible, and if the clerks were supposed to make us feel any better by wearing Santa hats, it was a wasted effort.

Once I left the post office I contemplated stopping by school to see if Linnette was in the bookstore and whether she knew anything about Matt. I drove in that general direction, since it wasn't much of a detour on my way home. Before I got there I pa.s.sed another sign that made me pull into a different parking lot instead. Inside the building there I was likely to find somebody who could answer my question.

The Rancho Conejo satellite office of the Ventura County Star didn't have a lot of desks or equipment. Maybe a dozen cubicles ranged across the one fair-sized room, and it was hard to see how many of them were occupied. The receptionist looked like she hadn't been out of high school long, nor was she very concerned about security. When I told her I was looking for Sam Blankenship she stopped popping her gum while having a phone conversation long enough to point toward a corner cubicle and then went back to what she was doing.

The spot she'd pointed to didn't seem to be occupied, but I headed that way anyway, and I was in luck. Before I found anything in my purse to leave a note for Sam with, he ambled across the open s.p.a.ce between the cubicle maze.

"Hey, I was just thinking about you," he said with a smile. "Want to give me a quote for the incredibly small story I'm going to write about the guy charged with doing in the DB you found?"

"Maybe. What's a DB, and who is this guy?" I knew the answer to the second question, but not the first. Sam wore khakis and another one of his ties that I guessed came from a thrift store. At least he didn't shop the bargain bin in the thrift store anyway. And his white shirt, while it wasn't new, didn't have any stains or holes, either.

"Ah. Sometimes I forget that I don't always speak plain English any more. 'DB' means dead body. That's shorthand the cops use all the time, not in court or anything, but when they're talking to each other. And sometimes they use it when they talk to me. And the guy is...let me see-" he flipped out a notepad "-Matthew Seavers, age twenty-four, who just had a bail hearing that I covered at the county courthouse, for all the good it did me."

"Why, didn't anything happen?" My hopes sank a little at Sam's disappointed look.

"Not much. n.o.body said anything that was worth a story, even if the guy did get released. His lawyer got the charges knocked down to suspicion of manslaughter and got the guy released to the custody of his employer, who vouched for him. But absolutely n.o.body was saying anything to anybody outside the courtroom."

I hated to tell Sam, but I thought that was as it should be. Ray wouldn't likely talk to him about any of this, and Brian couldn't have his client talking to anybody at this point. I was glad to hear that somebody at Leopold Plumbing thought enough of Matt to stand up in court for him. "So you think I'd have a comment on this?"

"Hey, it's possible. You found the body so maybe you have some ideas about who killed the guy. The cops must have thought this Seavers did it or they wouldn't have bothered to arrest him and hold him."

"Sam, I can't say anything you could use for publication. All I saw was Frank Collins after death. Nothing before that, and not much after that told me anything, either. Matt was on a crew that worked that remodeling project, but there had probably been a dozen guys around the site in the week before that, and I wouldn't have expected the week after Thanksgiving to be any different."

Sam blew out a gust of air that sounded like a horse snort. "Great. So I still have about a two-paragraph story with no details on anything." He looked down at his notes again. "Wonder if anything else that happened at the courthouse today is worth a couple inches. I may have to go back to working on a feature about the courthouse employees' contributions to Toys for Tots."

"Not as exciting as murder, but definitely a good cause. I know you'll do a nice job writing it up."

"Yeah, well, I better. They don't pay me the big bucks to sit around." His wry grin commented more than his words on the "big bucks" Sam got as a reporter. I made a mental note to put together a tin of homemade cookies and bring it down to the newspaper office some time the end of the week. It sounded like the least I could do for a struggling journalist.

There weren't a lot of cars in the staff lot at school when I cruised by. I didn't see Linnette's anywhere, so I didn't bother stopping to check the bookstore. Once I got back home I realized that unlike most of my Southern California friends who had their cell phones charged, turned on and ready all the time, I'd been walking around all day with mine turned off. When I powered up there were messages waiting for me.

The answering machine message light blinked as well, and I debated which to check first. In the end it didn't matter much, because the only message that was worth listening to was repeated both places. "If you get to a phone before five-thirty, come join us for mochas at Charlie's," Linnette called out over what sounded like a crowd. She was probably standing in Charlie's when she left the message.

Charlie's was the independent coffee house closest to church, and the one we tended to visit at when school wasn't in session and my place of business didn't afford everybody somewhere to gather. I didn't even bother changing out of my errand-running jeans, but left a note for Ben and went straight back out to the car.

It was just early enough that rush hour traffic was still light, and I found Linnette and Lexy celebrating at a corner table. "Great, you got my message." My best friend patted the empty chair beside her. "We even saved you a place."

I ordered my own drink at the counter and splurged on whipped cream like my friends. "Brian seems to have been a very good choice as an attorney," I told Lexy as I sat down.

"I thought so. He called me as soon as they got out of court. Fred Chambers, the crew chief for Leopold, took Matt home with him tonight. He said this way he could keep an eye on him for a couple days."

"That makes sense. You look mighty festive," I told Lexy, admiring the red dress she wore.

"Office holiday lunch." She wrinkled her nose. "I could have thought of half a dozen ways I'd rather spend two hours today, but couldn't get out of it."

"What was so bad about it?" Linnette asked, always the Christian Friends leader.

Lexy surprised me by blinking away a couple tears. "Two different people that have been out on maternity leave joined us for lunch, both with these precious little babies in red-and-white stretchy suits gurgling in baby carriers."

Linnette patted her hand. "It's the roughest right around the holidays, isn't it? Everybody puts such an emphasis on family we forget how hard it is for those who don't have the family situation they want."

Lexy made a face. "And it's only going to get worse when we go to the family gatherings for the next two weeks and deal with the aunts and cousins who just have to ask the questions about why I'm still not pregnant."

It didn't seem fair that somebody as sweet and caring as Lexy had to go through that stuff. "Maybe we can make out a rotation chart so that Linnette and I can go with you to these things. There's nothing like the presence of a stranger to put a damper on the nosy questions."

Lexy gave a tremulous smile. "Thanks. I know you'd do it, too. I might take you up on it, too. In fact, maybe both of you could come the twenty-third for the buffet at Steve's mom's house. It will take more than one stranger to intimidate his aunt Rhonda."

At least we could laugh about things like that together, I thought. Maybe this could be a way for me to keep from spending the whole week of Christmas alone when Ben left. Once again hope, chocolate and friends saved a bad situation.

Chapter Eighteen.

Since Ben now knew he would be leaving California Thursday to spend the holidays with his father, I didn't see much of him. Judging from the oddly wrapped packages that appeared under the tree some time during my busy Tuesday, he spent part of the time shopping. A great deal of it was spent with Cai Li, of course. This relationship must have been developing most of the semester, that or they had certainly clicked with each other quickly. They weren't to the point of finishing each others' sentences yet, and fortunately there were no inappropriate displays of affection in public, at least around me. But they just had that moony look gazing into each others' eyes that said "young and in love" to me.

The two of them spent a bit of time that evening at the apartment. I baked Christmas cookies while they played some goofy video game again. Finally at about nine Ben got on the computer, and a minute later gave a whoop.

"All right! I made the Dean's list. Pretty good for my first semester, huh?"

"Definitely. Let's see those grades." I put down the pan of cookies just out of the oven, and went into the living room where Ben had his cla.s.s records still up on the screen. "So, maybe Philosophy of Religion wasn't as hard as you thought." He'd posted a B-plus in the cla.s.s, and that was his lowest grade.

"Eh. Maybe it was as hard as I thought and I had some good study help. You want to call up your grades, too, Mom?"

"Sure. If you know my student ID number you can even do it for me, that or take the rest of the snicker-doodles off the baking sheet before they stick."

"There are warm cookies?" Ben looked at Cai Li. "Race you to the kitchen." With his long legs he beat her by several lengths and I could hear them laughing over the goodies there while I punched in the information to get the right screen up.

My grades were almost as good as Ben's. With only having nine hours of grad work, a B in a three-hour cla.s.s pushed me down to a 3.67, which still wasn't too shabby. I wondered if anybody out here at any of the arcades or kid-friendly places gave rewards for good grades. The hours Ben spent at Tilt in St. Louis playing games with those hard-won tokens for each A on his report card still conjure up pleasant memories. It made me consider asking the pair in the kitchen if they wanted to go someplace that served pizza and featured skee-ball machines just for old times' sake.

Still, I suspected that would get me eye rolls from both of them. Surely they felt too mature for such behavior. "Anybody for s...o...b..z Pizza?" I called out, waiting for the groans.

"Mom, you're so out of it. They haven't called it that in years. Maybe never in California," Ben hollered back. "Besides, they're closed by now. You know how Rancho Conejo rolls up the sidewalks by eight at night."

We settled for the local ice-cream parlor instead, with me buying. Since they were celebrating, both kids got the featured "kiddie" sundae. Personally it gave me a feeling of relief that these two weren't pushing for a more grown-up relationship right away. Any young woman who could eat bubble-gum ice cream with gummy worms and still claim to have a good time on a date was somebody Ben could bring home often.

After dessert the kids dropped me back off at the apartment to finish the rest of the cookie baking while they went to Cai Li's house to watch a movie. Once the baking and dishes were done I settled down to read my Bible study for the next morning. Since I was off this week, I'd agreed to go with Dot to the Wednesday morning women's study group. This time I wanted to be more than four verses ahead of the discussion in cla.s.s.

It didn't take long to discover the next morning that almost everybody else had chosen this week before Christmas to slack off in preparation. I sat with Dot and she and I seemed to be the only ones who'd read the lesson in depth. Linnette focused on the conversations she'd had with her daughters the night before on the phone, cementing the fact that neither of them would be home for Christmas for more than a day. "And probably not even the same day, at that. This parenting adults stuff is hard. I mean, I want them to be independent people with their own plans and resources...."

"But you'd also like them to be your girls during holidays and such," Dot finished as Linnette nodded in agreement.

Tracy Collins slid into the empty seat next to Dot, carrying a cup of coffee and looking less wan than she had in weeks. Instead she looked a bit irate. "So how do you keep kids from getting independent too quickly? Frankie pitched a fit this morning when I told him he had to get up and mind his sisters while I came here. You'd think I was torturing him or something."

Dot sighed. "A lot of teens go through that. They go through those phases where nothing is important except what their friends think."

"Yeah, and I don't like his friends. I wish he had different ones, preferably friends who didn't like head-banger music and T-shirts with rude sayings." I remembered being in Tracy's shoes in that regard just a few years ago. At least I'd had Hal to back me up from a distance. That and the a.s.sistance my mom gave me helped keep Ben on the right track. I kept my mouth shut right now, because I figured the last thing Tracy wanted was sympathy from me.

"Did he give you any particular reason for not wanting to watch the girls?" Dot asked. "Not that there's any good one, but maybe you could be prepared next time."

"He said he'd promised somebody he'd stay close to the phone and the computer. I threatened to take away his privileges on both if he didn't shape up, and that's when he totally lost it. He acted like whatever he was doing was a matter of life and death."

"So many things are when you're thirteen," Linnette said. "My girls were only a little older than that when their dad died, but it seemed like every crisis for about two years after that was blown way out of proportion. Maybe it was their way of using up the grief they hadn't spent when Tom died."

Tracy looked skeptical. "Maybe that's it. I don't know, though. Boys are so different. And since I was a little kid when most of my brothers went through being thirteen, I don't know if this is mostly normal stuff he's doing or way over the top."

"If my experience is any help, almost anything is possible from a boy that age, especially if you're raising him alone. Ben's dad was three states away and not real helpful when Ben was thirteen. I was basically on my own, and he was a handful."

Tracy's face softened. "Maybe I'm just expecting too much too soon. But I never know whether he's going to act way too mature for his age or younger than his four-year-old sister these days. I guess I didn't expect to get the preschooler behavior over just waking up early and watching the girls. It's like having Frank and his opinions all over again."

Ouch. I decided to let that slide without comment because I didn't have anything to say. It felt best to stick to teenagers. "It's a time to choose your battles. If you don't want to fight over everything you have to decide what the important things are and stick to those and ignore the rest. There were times when I felt like it would have needed a backhoe to clean Ben's room, but I could shut the door on it. I saved my breath for insisting he do his homework and be civil to his grandmother."

"The homework is a constant battle. It's a split decision on grandmas. He puts my mom down, but he makes nice with Grandma Collins because she slips him money and goodies that the girls don't get." Tracy's expression told me what she thought of her mother-in-law's behavior.

We'd gotten so far afield from the Bible study that it actually startled me when Helen Marshall, our study leader and the church secretary, got down to business, shushed us all and got into the lesson. Tracy and I didn't have any more time to talk, but her problems with Frank, Jr. were on my mind all morning.

When the study was over and I looked for her so we could talk more, she was gone. "Where'd Tracy go anyway?" I asked Dot. She usually kept track of everybody.

"I don't know. Her cell phone rang about twenty minutes into the study and she left the room and never came back. That's a shame because I was thinking about asking her if she wanted to go out to lunch with us."

"Us? Does that mean I'm included?"

"Certainly. And I'll ask Linnette since she's here, too. I was thinking about picking up Candace and Lucy for lunch someplace as a pre-holiday treat. Does that sound good?"

"Sure." Ben wouldn't be home for lunch on his last day here, I knew. He'd already told me he would have lunch with Cai Li and dinner with me and we'd have our Christmas gift exchange afterward. So I had nothing to hurry home for.

Linnette liked the idea of going, too, so we decided to leave her car in the lot and take Dot's and mine to Camarillo since I knew the way to the girls' place.

"Candace almost always has Wednesdays off, but I'm not sure about Lucy. With all the kids being off from school by now, she may be working extra hours at the theater," Dot said as we got into our cars and caravanned over to Rose House.

Lucy wasn't there when we arrived, but it wasn't because she had to work. Kirsten looked sad when Dot told her our plans. "I'm afraid Lucy's gone. She complained of not feeling well yesterday afternoon, and when I called to tell Estella that, she came right over and hustled her sister out of here. She said all the excitement of everything going on was bad for Lucy and that she'd be better off at Estella's for a while. I don't know if that's true, as much time as she spends at the hospital. I hope she takes her to a doctor. Lucy looked like she was really hurting by the time they left here."

Dot sighed. "I guess that's Estella's decision to make. Too bad that Lucy won't be around for a while. I'd hoped we could take her to Christmas Eve services with us at the chapel. I imagine there's always next year, but she seems to have gotten comfortable at our church and I wanted to encourage that."

"I know. And Matt called here several times yesterday trying to reach her. Apparently Estella has changed her phone number and didn't give him the new one. I felt bad not being able to give it to him, but Ms. Perez told me it was an unlisted number and she didn't want it given out to anyone, especially not Matt." Kirsten didn't look like she agreed with that decision, but I knew she had to abide by it. "He and Lucy haven't gotten to see each other since he was arrested."

"That's a shame, but there's not much we can do about it. Let's get Candace and go to lunch," Dot said. She went down the hall and knocked on her daughter's bedroom door.