The Sleeping Doll

brief?”
    “Brief? No, not really. But if you want a synopsis I could do it, sure. Three, four pages?”
    “That’d be great. It’ll take me forever to pull it together from all of that.”
    “ All of that?” Chuckling. “That’s nothing. By the time I’m ready to write the book, I’ll have fifty times more notes and sources. But, sure, I’ll gin up something.”
    “Hi,” a youthful voice said.
    Dance smiled at Sonja in the doorway.
    An envious glance at the agent’s figure, then her braid. “I saw you looking at my drawings. When you came in?”
    “Honey, Agent Dance is busy.”
    “No, it’s okay.”
    “Do you want to see them?”
    Dance sank to her knees to look at the sketchpad. They were pictures of butterflies, surprisingly well done.
    “Sonja, these are beautiful. They could be in a gallery on Ocean in Carmel.”
    “You think?”
    “Definitely.”
    She flipped back a page. “This one’s my favorite. It’s a swallowtail.”
    The picture was of a dark blue butterfly. The color was iridescent.
    “It’s sitting on a Mexican sunflower. They get nectar from that. When I’m at home we go out into the desert and I draw lizards and cactuses.”
    Dance remembered that the writer’s full-time residence was Scottsdale.
    The girl continued, “Here, my mommy and I go out in the woods and we take pictures. Then I draw them.”
    He said, “She’s the James Audubon of butterflies.”
    Joan appeared in the doorway and ushered the child out.
    “Think that’ll do any good?” Nagle asked, gesturing at the box.
    “I don’t know. But I sure hope so. We need some help.”
    Dance said good night, turned down another dinner invitation and returned to the car.
    She set the box on the seat next to her. The photocopies beckoned and she was tempted to turn on the dome light and have a look now. But the material would have to wait. Kathryn Dance was a good investigator, just as she’d been a good reporter and a good jury consultant. But she was also a mother and a widow. And the unique confluence of those roles required her to know when to pull back from her other job. It was now time to be home.

Chapter 19
    This was known as the Deck.
    An expanse of gray pressure-treated wood, twenty by thirty feet, extending from the kitchen of Dance’s house into the backyard and filled with mismatched lawn chairs, loungers and tables. Tiny electric Christmas lights, some amber globes, a sink and a large refrigerator were the main decorations, along with a few anemic plants in terra-cotta bowls. A narrow stairway led down to the backyard, hardly landscaped, though it was filled with plenty of natural flora: scrub oak and maple trees, monkey flowers, asters, lupine, potato vines, clover and renegade grass.
    A stockade fence provided separation from the neighbors. Two birdbaths and a feeder for hummingbirds hung from a branch near the stairs. Two wind chimes lay on the ground where Dance, in her pajamas, had dumped them at 3 A.M. one particularly stormy night a month ago.
    The classic Victorian house—dark green with gray, weathered banisters, shutters and trim—was in the northwestern part of Pacific Grove; if you were willing to risk a precarious lean, you could catch a glimpse of ocean, about a half-mile away.
    Dance spent plenty of time on the Deck. It was often too cold or misty for an early breakfast but on lazy weekends, after the sun had melted the fog, she and the children might come here after a walk on the beach with the dogs and have bagels and cream cheese, coffee and hot chocolate. Hundreds of dinner parties, large and small, had been hosted on the uneven planks.
    The Deck was where her husband, Bill, had told his parents firmly that, yes, he was marrying Kathryn Dance and, by corollary, not the Napa socialite his mother had championed for several years—an act braver for him than much of what he’d done with the FBI.
    The Deck was where they’d had his memorial service.
    It was also a gathering-place for friends both inside and outside the law enforcement community on the Peninsula. Kathryn Dance enjoyed her friendships but after Bill’s death she’d chosen to spend her free time with her children. Not wanting to take them to bars or restaurants with her adult friends, she brought the friends into their world.
    There was beer and soda in the outdoor fridge, and usually a bottle or two of basic Central Coast Chardonnay or Pinot Grigio and Cabernet. A stained, rusty but functional barbecue grill