Read In the Still of the Night for Free Online Page B

was time to go.
    Once more, Barb jumped from her son's car and headed for the Alaska/Horizon arrival gate. Luckily, Ronda's plane wouldn't land for another fifteen minutes. Barb knew she had plenty of time, but she found herself running down the corridor, darting between people, baggage, children, and strollers. All the chairs were taken when she got to the gate, but she didn't care. She stood with her eyes glued to the double doors that would soon spring open and release scores of passengers. And Ronda would be one of them.
    "It was Christmastime," Barb Thompson remembered a decade later. "Joy and laughter were in the air. We would be having Christmas together for the first time in nearly eight years. Ronda had to leave on the twenty-first to get back to her job, so we planned Christmas dinner and our gift exchange early. It was enough that we could just be together."
    It was 2:50 P.M. and Barb watched the incoming planes circle in the cold sky and then taxi in to their gates. Finally, she saw the Alaska Airlines jet and knew it must be Ronda's plane. She watched the ground crew wave their big orange wands and lead it into a covered ramp, and heard its engines winding down.
    In her mind, she could see Ronda's face. She knew her daughter would be one of the last to deplane; she liked to let all those with babies, as well as the elderly and disabled passengers, exit safely, and Ronda always grinned widely when she saw her mother's face change from impatience to delight.
    Barb stretched and strained her neck to see beyond the departing passengers as far as she could. At three, the last of them straggled in--a mother holding a baby in one arm, and a little girl about five crying and pulling on her other arm.
    No one else. But that could not be. Two flight attendants walked past Barb, pulling their luggage, talking and joking, and the plane's door slammed shut behind them. She wanted to confront them and demand to know where Ronda was. But she didn't.
    "I was suddenly nauseated," Barb Thompson recalled. "My mind whirled and I felt dizzy.
Where was Ronda?
I could see the chaplain's face in my mind now. His words were screaming in my ears. 'Your father wants you to call him at the Lewis County Coroner's Office.' It hit me like a ton of bricks. Oh, my God! My
baby
! No, no, it can't be! He hadn't been talking about my little girl. She must have just fallen asleep and didn't get off the plane. Any moment now the doors will swing open and there she'll be there."
    But Ronda wasn't there. She hadn't been on the plane, or even on the manifest of passengers.
    Barb made up every possible reason why her daughter hadn't arrived as she had promised--every reason
but
the one that tortured her the most. She simply could not face that possibility.
    Finally, she dialed Information and asked for the number of the Lewis County Coroner's Office. When the operator asked her the state, Barb still didn't know. At length the operator came back on the line and gave her a number beginning with a 360 prefix. Barb's knees buckled. That was Ronda's prefix. But Lewis County hadn't meant anything to her; she thought Ronda lived in Thurston County.
    Knowing what she didn't want to know, Barb Thompson called the number for the coroner's office. She identified herself to the female voice that answered.
    "Are you Ronda Reynolds's mother?"
    "Yes . . . I am."
    "I'm sorry to inform you that your daughter died this morning."
    "How?"
Barbara didn't recognize her own voice. It was hollow.
    "Your daughter committed suicide."
    Barb didn't believe it.
    She never did. For more than eleven years, Barb Thompson worked to discover the truth about her daughter's death, to remove that word
suicide
from Ronda's death certificate.
    But nothing ever fit. Nothing ever matched. There are a number of suspects in Ronda's death, and as many motives. The main players each have their own theories--their particular script of what went on on that frigid night in December 1998.
    And some of