Failure to Appear by J. A. Jance

Alex declared firmly, "Dinky would never steer us wrong."
    At the intersection, I turned left on Siskiyou Boulevard. "Wanna bet?" I said.
    Fortunately, we didn't bet. The food at Cowboy Sam's New Bistro probably would have been excellent, if we had actually stayed around long enough to eat any of it. We drove to an ancient, porticoed gas station north of town. The only distinguishing feature visible from the road really was a phone booth, but the inside of the building had been remodeled into a series of small, intimate lace-curtained dining rooms. The several glossily enameled wooden tables—I counted only eight—were already filling up.
    The proprietor, who must have been Cowboy Sam himself, led us to a table where Dinky Holloway was already seated and waiting. Even to someone who had only seen her once, she didn't look quite right. To Alex it must have been even more apparent that something was dreadfully wrong.
    "Dinky, what's going on? You look terrible."
    Dinky gave Alex a wan smile. We started to sit down. The way the table was arranged, I headed for the chair that was next to the wall, but this was a very old gas station. The low, sloping ceiling was too short for me to stand upright next to the wall. There seemed to be a lot of that going around in Ashland: first the sloping bathroom ceiling at the Oak Hill B & B; now the same kind of construction at a converted gasoline station. I was beginning to think Ashland was built by and for midgets.
    Alex and I quickly traded seats while Denver Holloway studied me with a frankly assessing look. "Are you really as trustworthy as Alex says?" she asked.
    I glanced at Alex. "I'd like to think so, why?"
    Dinky reached into a cavernous purse and extracted a semi-clear plastic container, the kind you get from video stores.
    "What's that?" I asked.
    She put it down on the table and then pushed it to the center as though she didn't want it too near her.
    "Just what it looks like," she answered. "A videotape. It showed up in my inter-office mail this afternoon."
    Since Denver Holloway was regarding the container with the kind of guarded wariness most people reserve for a coiled rattlesnake, it seemed possible she was leaving something unsaid.
    "What kind of videotape?" I asked.
    "Filth."
    "Filth?" I repeated, not sure I had heard her correctly. "As in porno flick?"
    She nodded grimly. "It came today along with this." She pushed a piece of paper across the table. Typed on it was the following: Dinky, Someone like this is a liability to the Festival and will drive away donors. Get rid of her as soon as possible. Monica .
    "As soon as I read it, I went storming down to Monica's office and bitched her out. I'm a director with some artistic integrity. I'll be damned if I'll be threatened by some hotshot golden girl pulling the purse strings."
    Alex looked at me and rolled her eyes. "That's one meeting I'm glad I missed. What happened?"
    "Monica denied it," Dinky continued. "Said she'd never seen any videotape, and that she hadn't sent the note, either."
    "What happened then?"
    "I went back to my office to play the tape."
    "And?"
    Dinky's face crumpled. "It's awful. I've never seen anything like it. When I realized what it was, I turned it off."
    Whatever Denver Holloway had seen, it had rocked her to the very core. There are only a few things guaranteed to produce that kind of appalled reaction in decent, law-abiding folks.
    "Snuff film or kiddie porn?" I asked.
    Dinky swallowed hard. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing, and she wasn't even that old. It's monstrous." She paused before continuing in a small, constrained voice. "Ever since, all I've been able to think about is what'll happen to her now, and what about the baby?"
    Alex reached out and put a comforting hand on Denver Holloway's wrist. "The girl in the video is someone you know?"
    Dinky nodded, her face a pasty white. Two gigantic tears spilled from her highly magnified eyes and dribbled slowly down her pale cheeks. "It's