Page 40 of Water's Edge

Your being a jerk?

“Let me show you something,” he says, then gets up and leaves the room. Ronnie is stifling a giggle and I flash her a stern look. He comes right back carrying a folder stuffed with papers. He takes a set of papers out and hands them to me. It’s a rental agreement signed by Joe Bohleber and Leann Truitt going back a year. Jim Truitt is listed as her reference and it clearly states he is her father.

Bohleber lied. He said he wasn’t sure of their relationship.

There are copies of money orders made out to Steve Bohleber in the amount of eight hundred dollars. Ronnie didn’t say whom the money order they found in Leann’s rental was written for. Maybe these were something else?

“You’re paying your daughter’s rent?” I ask.

“I paid more than that. I may not have approved of her decisions—destructive as they were—but she was my daughter. Mr. Bohleber is a cheat. He wanted to keep the baby so he could get more money out of me. I paid what he asked, and he convinced her to give it up for adoption. I wanted it to go to a good family and not a dysfunctional wreck of one. In the end I wasn’t told what happened.”

Dr. Andrade said she’d had a child recently. Truitt just confirmed it.

“You’re talking about Leann’s baby?”

“Of course,” he says, narrowing his brow. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“Bohleber is the father of Leann’s child.”

I didn’t say it like a question, and I hoped he wouldn’t realize how little I knew.

“He called and warned me that you would be coming. He said the police were coming for a copy of this rental agreement. He offered to make it disappear for a price. I told him to go to hell. He gets nothing else from me. Leann’s gone. The baby’s gone. My wife is gone. But I still have a purpose. I can connect. I can…”

His words trail off and he stares out of the windows at the water. I’m afraid he will ask us to leave. I’m afraid for his sake that he won’t ask. It amazes me that he still hasn’t yet asked how his daughter died.

It’s even more amazing that I can control my temper.

“I just want to confirm that Joe Bohleber is the father of Leann’s baby,” I say.

He looks confused. “No,” he says. “Not that one. His twin. Steve. Steve is the father. At least, he got her pregnant. He would never have made a good father.”

He looks down and shakes his head, and for the first time I see what I believe is real emotion.

“She should never have come home.”

Twenty

Ronnie is busy unpacking the interview with Jim Truitt as we make our way back to the office. Nonstop. To be fair, there is plenty to unpack.

I need a Scotch. Make that two.

“So let me see if I’ve got this straight,” she says. “Her father was paying her rent to Joe Bohleber to bribe Steve, the father of her baby, to convince Leann to give the baby up?”

That was too many words, but that was about it. Truitt had convinced himself that he was serving a higher purpose as dictated by his secret soul. He might have loved his daughter, but he couldn’t stand the shame of her becoming pregnant by a lowlife farmer turned handyman turned landlord.

“The whole thing makes me sick,” I say.

Leann had left school and given up her chance at a career that would have made her father proud—one he could brag about at the yacht club or when he was moored off a private island. Yet he failed to recognize that he had ruined his daughter’s life with his holier-than-thou expectations and interference. And his money too. When his wife and then his daughter didn’t live up to his standards, he paid them both off. The wife got a divorce and a beachfront property in St. Lucia. His daughter got pregnant and wanted nothing from him but money.

“To top it off,” I add, “his so-called soul contract spirit instructed him to do it so he could be reincarnated.”

“Remind me not to join his club,” Ronnie says.

I give her a smile.

As far as useful information goes, Jim Truitt knew only that she had tended bar in Port Townsend. He didn’t know which one. He didn’t know any of her friends. He didn’t know where she banked. He sent her money orders each month to tide her over, maybe to her post office box or maybe delivered by Bohleber. He didn’t want word of his disappointing daughter to spread around the yacht club.

“Deputy Davis picked up the rental agreement from Bohleber,” Ronnie says, reading a text. “I guess we’ll be working late again tonight?”

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