The digital clock on my dashboard read 3:47 p.m. when I pulled into the driveway of our modest two-story house in suburban Portland. The bouquet of white lily sat on the porch wrapped in black ribbon, the kind you see at funerals.
I grabbed the small card tucked between the stems.
Sorry for your loss, Ingred.
I stood there, rain starting to mist around me, reading those five words three more times. My mother-in-law, Ingred Barlo, hadn’t spoken to me in 4 months. Not since I’d refused to let her take Jake for an entire summer to her place in Seattle.
Not since I told her that her drinking problem meant supervised visits only.
I pulled out my phone and dialed her number.
“Gregory.”
Her voice was cold, crisp. The voice of a woman who’d spent 30 years as a federal prosecutor before retiring.
“What loss, Ingred?”
Silence stretched between us like a wire pulled taut.
“Ingred, what the hell does this mean?”
The line went dead. I called back twice.
Voicemail both times.
That knot in my stomach, the one I’d carried since my wife Sarah died in that accident 18 months ago, tightened.
My son Jake was supposed to be home by 4:00. I was a structural engineer who worked from home 3 days a week specifically to be there when he got off the bus. At 4:15, when the bus rumbled past our house without stopping, I called Clearwater Elementary.
“Mr.
Piper,” Principal Ellen Dyer’s voice was cautious, professional. “Jake was signed out at 2:30 this afternoon.”
“By who?”
“Let me check the log.” A pause. “It says here a family member, Ingred Barlo.
She had proper identification and said there was a family emergency.”
I was in my car before she finished the sentence.
The drive to Ingred’s house took 35 minutes. Thirty-five minutes of my mind racing through possibilities, each worse than the last. My hands gripped the steering wheel so tight my knuckles went white.
Ingred lived in a modernist glass-and-steel mansion overlooking the Columbia River, bought with her late husband’s Boeing pension and her own substantial savings.
The gate was open.
That should have been my first warning.
I drove up the winding driveway, gravel crunching under my tires. The house was dark except for a single light in the kitchen. I pounded on the front door, then tried the handle.
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