The GPS sent us off 520 at 84th, the first exit after the bridge. We drove past a golf course and turned right at the end of it. At 12th Avenue NE there were a couple of those newer stacked-box-looking houses that seem to be sprouting up like weeds everywhere, but when I finally located the address Scotty had given me, the house was totally invisible from the street. Concealed behind the barrier of a twelve-foot-high laurel hedge, there was no need for a No Trespassing sign, because the hedge was totally impenetrable. The only means of egress was through an imposing ten-foot-tall gate made of sheets of rusted corten steel. There was a post holding an intercom situated on the left side of the driveway. I pulled up next to that, buzzed down my car window, and pressed the call button.
“May I help you?” asked a disembodied voice.
“I’m here to see Lenora Harrison.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No.”
“May I tell Mrs. Harrison your name and what this is about?”
“My name is J. P. Beaumont. I’m a private investigator looking into the disappearance of her nephew Peter, aka Petey, Mayfield.”
Lucy and I sat there for the next five or so minutes, cooling our jets. Then finally, without another word from the intercom, the heavy gate rolled open. What was on the other side was breathtaking, and about as far from Lenora’s humble beginnings in her parents’ West Seattle home as can be imagined. Before me was a sprawling mansion, painted pastel yellow with dazzling white trim and shutters. The columns lining the front porch made the house look downright palatial. The house was surrounded by a spread of immaculately manicured lawns punctuated with blossoming cherry trees and tall weeping cedars. The circular driveway was made of redbrick pavers and widened into a courtyard directly in front of the house. Off to one side stood a four-car garage. Parked nearby on this clear spring day were three recently washed and waxed vehicles—a white Tesla Model S, a black Porsche Carrera GT, and a bright red Ferrari California T with the top down. Talk about conspicuous consumption!
As I approached the house, one of the double front doors opened and a woman stepped out onto the porch. The first thing I noticed about Lenora Elizabeth Harrison was her flaming red hair. She was relatively tall and dressed in a long-sleeved, figure-hugging top worn over a pair of skintight designer jeans. The jeans came complete with a few of those ladderlike tears in both thighs that reveal the peekaboo flashes of bare flesh that are seemingly a high-fashion necessity these days.
I grew up dirt poor. If I ended up with a hole in the knees of my pants, my mother patched them. When the pants were no longer patchworthy—usually because I’d outgrown them and they were inches too short—they went into the trash. Seeing a rich babe wearing torn jeans and posing as poor is something that, like the toll on the 520 Bridge, makes me want to grind my teeth. And speaking of posing, she stood at the top of the steps leaning against a wooden column with her hands on her hips as if daring me to try coming inside. I remembered that particular stance from my old Fuller Brush–selling days. It meant, “Don’t even bother.”
“Okay,” I said to Lucy as I unbuckled my seat belt. “You might as well stay in the car. It doesn’t look as though the welcome mat is out.”
“Good afternoon,” I said, extending one of my cards as I approached the front porch.
“My name is Lenora Harrison, and you are?” she asked.
“As I told the person over the intercom, my name is J. P. Beaumont. I’m a private investigator looking into the disappearance of your nephew, Peter Mayfield.”
Lenora took the proffered card and studied it for some time. While she examined the card, I examined her. According to Hilda Tanner, Lenora’s younger brother had been born when Agnes was in her early forties. That would mean Agnes would have been in her late thirties or early forties when Lenora was born. Looking at the woman on the porch, it would have been easy to place Lenora Harrison somewhere in her fifties or maybe her early sixties. I had no doubt that “she’d had some work done” on her face, leaving behind one indelible giveaway—the vertical lines above her lips that told everyone who saw her that she’d once been a smoker.