JP Beaumont 11 - Failure To Appear (v5.0) Read Online Free

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    F ollowing the attendant’s detailed directions, I drove out through the end of town, under a freeway, and past a golf course. In the process, as distracted as I was, I couldn’t help noticing that this quiet corner of southern Oregon is beautiful country.
    The town of Ashland is nestled in a broad valley only a few miles north of the California border. June in Seattle usually carries on gray, rainy, and cold. Here, the atmosphere had a California feel to it—dry and airy. The sky was a clear, untroubled blue.
    With the onset of early summer heat, lush grassland had turned gold in sharp contrast to the fringe of the steep oak-and pine-covered hilltops that formed the valley’s border. In one fenced field, a single cow stretched her neck to crop scarce but reachable leaves from a few low-hanging branches. That explained why the trees had such a uniform, trimmed appearance. They all looked as if they were subject to constant, loving pruning, and they were—with hungry live-stock doing the trimming rather than people.
    I turned off the blacktop of a well-maintained county road onto what the sign said was Live Oak Lane. The word “Lane” vastly overstated the case. Live Oak Rut would have been closer to the truth. Some of the potholes were deep enough that I worried about the well-being of my low-slung Porsche. Luckily, I didn’t have far to go. The kid at the gas station had assured me that once I made it to Live Oak, I wouldn’t miss the house, since the road dead-ended just past Live Oak Farm.
    At first glance, when I saw the house winking at me through a grove of trees, I was surprised. Expecting a disreputable, run-down shack, I glimpsed instead an enormous two-story farmhouse. The place probably dated from back in the days of large families when hard-pressed farmers had homegrown all the kids they could manage. Then as now, kids had meant mouths to feed, but back then they had been a steady source of unpaid labor as well. They provided the extra hands to gather in the crops and get all the chores done. Back then kids had meant survival, not hassle.
    As I bounced toward it, I wondered how many kids growing up in that old house had longed to run away from it, to escape dull country life for the excitement of the city. Any city. Now that very same house was a haven—a place to run to—for my city-bred daughter. More of Mrs. Reeder’s miserable irony.
    Eventually, the road turned and crossed a cattle guard. On a leaning fence post dangled a bullet-marred sign saying LIVE OAK FARM . Behind the sign stood a junkyard full of wrecked cars. Another rutted track, this one far narrower and rougher than the first, wound off through the cars toward the house.
    The Porsche thumped noisily over a bumpy set of metal rails embedded in the roadway. As I picked my way between potholes, I tried to glance up now and then to get my bearings. Derelict cars—rusted-out wrecks in various stages of decay—stood parked in haphazard rows that meandered off in either direction. Doors sagged open on broken hinges, and ambitious, sun-loving weeds grew up through the shattered windshields and cracked floorboards.
    The newest model I recognized was a once-dashing ’67 Chrysler New Yorker. The flattened roof and caved-in sides testified that the car had rolled over more than once on its way to this isolated auto graveyard. It was easy to assume that sometime in the seventies whoever had been running the wrecking yard had exhausted his supply of money or enthusiasm or both.
    The track turned sharply as I passed the Chrysler. Coming around the corner, I could see that the New Yorker’s broad bench seat had been pried loose from the car and positioned on the far side of the vehicle, possibly as someone’s idea of low-cost yard furniture.
    A young woman, clad in an almost nonexistent bikini, lay on this open-air tanning bench, soaking up some rays and seemingly oblivious to the sun-rotted foam leaking out of the seat beneath her. It