"That's it, then, Jonas," Beverly Piedmont said to me, watching as the last of my grandfather's ashes disappeared from view, slipping silently away and into the slate-gray depths of a dead-flat Lake Chelan.

The Lady of the Lake was moving slowly north and west from Chelan to Stehekin at the far end of the lake. Eastern Washington is supposedly the sunny side of the state. That wasn't true though on this mid-April day. The sky overhead was as dim and gray as it no doubt was back home in downtown Seattle.

When my grandmother had called me two days earlier to ask if I could take her to Lake Chelan to dispose of my grandfather's ashes, I had taken a look at the weather report and attempted to dissuade her. There was a storm blowing in off the Pacific. In Seattle proper, it most likely wouldn't be anything more serious than rain, but in the mountain passes that lay between Seattle and Lake Chelan -- Snoqualmie and Blewett or Stevens -- it might well turn into new snow to make the passes treacherous if not impassable. Initially, I suggested we wait a week or two until the weather improved. After all, what was the rush? In the months since my grandfather died, the box containing his ashes had languished on the floor of my entryway closet. It seemed ironic to me that Jonas Logan Piedmont and I had spent far more time together after he died than we had in all the years he was alive.

My suggestion of a delay, however, fell on deaf ears -- both literally and figuratively. "No, Jonas," Beverly had insisted firmly. "Now that Mandy's gone, it's time."

Jonas Piedmont Beaumont is my legal name, but it's not the name I go by. Friends and the people I work with down at the Seattle Police Department call me Beau or else J.P. My mother, long deceased, used to call me Jonas when I was little. Now that I have mended a family rift and reestablished contact with my long-estranged grandparents, my grandmother calls me that as well. It still sounds odd to my ear -- both strange and pleasing at the same time.

"Mandy's gone?" I asked. "Why didn't you call me? When did this happen?"

Mandy was my grandfather's silver-haired golden retriever. Pining for the old man, Mandy had slipped into a slow decline once he was gone. I had known she was failing, but I hadn't realized things had deteriorated that far. I had taken the dog to the vet on two separate occasions and had been prepared to take the poor old girl on her final trip there.

"Last week," my grandmother said. "When she stopped being able to get up and down by herself, I didn't want to bother you. After all, you're much too busy to be worrying about an old woman and her sick old dog. I called on the phone and found a mobile vet who came to the house and took care of things here. That way Mandy didn't have to be loaded in and out of a strange car -- she didn't much like going for rides, you know. Besides, I was able to be here with her when she went. But that's why I'm calling today, Jonas. The vet stopped by this afternoon and dropped off her ashes. It's what I've been waiting for. Mandy was so devoted to Papa, you see. I wanted to be able to sprinkle their ashes together."

Weather be damned, there was no arguing with that. "What day do you want to go?" I asked.

"Wednesday," she said at once. "I already checked. That's the day The Lady of the Lake starts making daily trips up and down the lake from Chelan to Stehekin. I thought we'd drive as far as Chelan on Wednesday, catch the boat and stay overnight at the lodge in Stehekin on Thursday, and then come back Friday. If you can get off work, that is. If not, I suppose we could always go over the weekend."

I'm a homicide detective for Seattle PD. After years of being a growth industry, murder in the Emerald City had taken a sudden sharp and unexpected downturn. Not willing to cut head count, the brass upstairs had us working like hell on cold cases stretching back as far as twenty years. They were also encouraging any and all unpaid leaves of absence.

"Don't worry," I told her. "Getting off work won't be a problem."

"Good," she said. "I'll call and make reservations."

Once off the phone, I studied the weather forecast then called Avis and arranged to rent a four-wheel-drive Explorer. I love my Porsche 928, but not in blizzard conditions, and certainly not with my eighty-something grandmother along for the ride.

"Where did you get this?" she asked when I picked her up bright and early Wednesday morning from the Phinney Ridge-area bungalow she and my grandfather had shared for more than fifty years.

"I rented it," I said.

"For this trip?"

"Yes."

"What's the matter with your cute little red car?" she asked.

"It's not that good on long trips," I said.

"Oh," she said, seeming to accept my little white lie at face value. "I hope this one didn't cost too much money."

"No, Grandmother," I told her. "It's dirt-cheap."

That was hardly true, but four-wheel drive came in handy. We were within ten miles of the summit on Stevens Pass going east when the rain turned to snow -- serious snow. If it hadn't been for the Explorer, I would have been out on the ground, rolling around on wet pavement, putting on chains.

Now, a day later, standing side by side in the dreary, overcast afternoon, my grandmother and I remained on the stern of the boat until long after the ashes disappeared. I had thought Beverly would be tearful when it came time to empty the ashes into the lake. Instead, she had performed the task with a quiet dignity that commanded my utmost respect. In the course of the trip I had learned, for the first time, that Chelan was where she and my grandfather had spent their one-night honeymoon years before, and that my grandfather had specifically requested that she strew his ashes there.

Since she said nothing more just then, I can't be sure what she was thinking. For myself, I was glad that at this late date I was finally having the opportunity to get to know more about her and about my grandfather, too. One story at a time, I was piecing together my family's history. I was also wondering how long eighty-six-year-old Beverly Piedmont would be able to remain in her own home. Rationally, I knew that she'd been essentially alone for several years, ever since my grandfather's crippling stroke had silenced him. Nonetheless, with both husband and dog now gone, the problem of Beverly's living alone seemed far more critical.

The issue had come home to me poignantly in the last twenty-four hours since my partner, Sue Danielson, and I had spent most of the previous day investigating the death of a sixty-seven-year-old woman in North Seattle who had burned to death in her home. The likely, but as yet unconfirmed, cause of Agnes Ferman's death was smoking in bed. Beverly Piedmont was a lot older than sixty-seven, but she didn't smoke. There was no cause to worry about her on that score, but still...

I wondered briefly about broaching the subject of maybe looking into finding a retirement home for her. I decided, however, that for the moment the best thing for me to do was to keep my mouth shut and mind my own business.

We might have stood there indefinitely, but eventually the bone-numbing chill drove us inside along with three or four other passengers who had been braving the great outdoors. "How about a sandwich and a cup of coffee?" I asked.

"That would be very nice," Beverly said, pulling her old-fashioned wool coat tightly around her. "It is chilly out here." It was also turning choppy. Even with the Dramamine I'd swallowed, I suddenly found myself feeling a bit gray around the gills.

Once Beverly was inside and settled at a small table, I went to fetch food. The coffee was strong and had sat in the pot for far too long. The sandwiches weren't the best, either, but Beverly downed hers with every evidence of enjoyment. She polished off the sandwich then sat back and eyed me in a speculative appraisal that reminded me of my mother. It came to me then that, had my mother survived breast cancer and lived to be her mother's age, this was how she would have looked as an old woman.

"So, Jonas," Beverly said, settling back with her coffee cup. Again there were echoes of my mother in the way she spoke. "What are you going to do with yourself?"

"Me?"

"Yes," she said. "You're not going to be a detective all your life, are you?"

Just because I had decided to mind my own business didn't mean my grandmother would do the same. "What do you mean?"

"Well, you started out as a uniformed patrol officer. Now you've been a detective for some time. Isn't the next step chief or something?"

I almost choked on a sip of my own coffee. "Most cops I know would call becoming chief a misstep rather than a step," I told her with a smile.

"You mean to say you don't want to be chief?" she asked. Words about what must have seemed a shocking lack of ambition weren't spoken aloud, but they lingered in the air nonetheless.

Decades ago the book, The Peter Principle, addressed the idea that people rise to the level of their own incompetence. I've found, however, that doesn't always hold true. In some bureaucracies, there are people who, through a combination of guile and/or political maneuvering manage to rise far above that level. In my humble opinion, the top floor of the Public Safety Building is rife with overreaching folks.

"Sorry," I said. "I'm just not into politics."

"I didn't mean you should run for office, although, now that you mention it, you'd make a fine legislator down in Olympia," Beverly returned, misunderstanding what I meant. "Still, isn't there some path for promotion available to you inside the department?"

As an expression of grandmotherly concern, this was a not-so-unreasonable question with no reasonable answer. Of course there were promotional opportunities available inside Seattle PD -- for those who wanted them, that is. For those who were willing to play the game. Unfortunately, climbing that ladder presupposes either wanting to or needing to, neither of which applies to me. Game playing has never been my strong suit, and I don't really need to work, although I had yet to hit on anything I'd rather do instead.

Ralph Ames, my attorney and financial guru, has been telling me for years that my continuing to work only adds to my tax problem. Grandmother or not, I had no intention of discussing the ins and outs of my financial situation with Beverly Piedmont. Nor did I see any reason to tell her that the main consideration keeping me on the job was the lack of any viable alternative. I've been a cop for more than twenty years, most of that time on the homicide squad. It has crossed my mind on occasion that if I ever stop being a detective -- something I think I do relatively well -- I might be tempted to return to my other favorite pastime -- drinking. Not surprisingly, my history of drinking was another topic that had no place in this little familial heart-to-heart.

Hoping to somehow derail the conversation and send it into less-sensitive territory, I settled for one of those stock replies that fills the void but is notably short on content. "But Grandmother," I objected, "I happen to like what I do."

She sniffed disapprovingly. "You mean to tell me you like dealing with all those terrible people?"

When Beverly Piedmont said that, I imagine she was thinking about rapists and serial killers. I thought, instead, about Sue Danielson, my new partner. Sue's a single mother stuck with the daunting assignment of working full time and raising two young boys without, as far as I can tell, the boys' biological father feeling obliged to lift a hand. I thought about Ron Peters, my wheelchair-bound ex-partner and his new wife, Amy. They're raising Ron's two girls from a previous marriage and expecting a boy of their own sometime in the next week or so. Then there's Sergeant Watkins and Capt. Larry Powell. There are the gun guys from the crime lab down in Tacoma who send out group Christmas cards year after year. Then there are the other criminalists in the crime lab and the people who work in the prosecutor's office. They're nice folks, most of them. They come complete with kids and dogs, jobs and mortgages, and slices, however thin, of the American dream.

The same can be said for most of the survivors -- the relatives and friends of homicide victims -- that we work with in the process of our investigations. These are people whose lives have been impossibly shattered. All their hopes and dreams have been irretrievably wrenched away from them by the unexpected loss of a loved one, but they're mostly nice, too. Heartbroken and hurting, but nice.

"Killers may be the scum of the earth," I told my grandmother. "But they come and go. We have to try to understand them -- try to learn what makes them tick -- but we don't spend all that much time with any of them. Most of the people I work with on a day-to-day basis aren't all that bad. In fact, I wouldn't call them terrible at all."

Unconvinced, Beverly clicked her tongue and shook her head. "You remind me so much of Kelly," she said. "That's exactly the kind of comment she would have made. She was always so contrary. There was never any reasoning with her."

For a disconcerting moment or two, I thought Beverly was talking about Kelly, my daughter. The unreasoning part certainly sounded familiar.

"You look like her sometimes, too," Beverly added softly as unexpected tears suddenly filled her eyes. "Especially when you smile, Jonas. I still miss her, you know -- miss her terribly. And I do so regret all those lost years when we should have been together."

And that's when I understood Beverly was talking about her daughter Kelly, not mine. About Carol Ann Piedmont, my mother. When Kelly -- that's what they called her, rather than Carol -- became an unwed mother at age seventeen, my unbending grandfather had disowned her. He had thrown her out of the house and forbidden any contact between Beverly and her daughter or between Beverly and her grandson -- me. It was only in the course of the last two years -- long after my mother's death and with my aging grandfather in ill health -- that the decades-old rift had finally been healed.

Reaching across the table, I covered my grandmother's small, frail, liver-spotted hand with my own massive mitt. I was glad to know I reminded someone of my mother -- thankful that Carol Ann Piedmont wasn't totally forgotten by everyone in the world but me.

My mother had raised me at a time when being a single mother wasn't in vogue. She had struggled to support us by working at home as a seamstress, by sewing fancy dresses for people far above our station in life. Countless times I remember going to bed on the living-room couch while she worked long into the night. On those nights I fell asleep to the steady hum of Mother's treadle-operated Singer. As a boy growing up, I knew our lives were different from those of most of the kids I knew. For one thing, most of them had fathers. For another, their mothers didn't work. It wasn't until much later -- until long after I was a father myself -- that I realized Carol Ann Piedmont was very much a hero.

"Good," I said, patting my grandmother's hand and trying to make a joke of things in hopes that she wouldn't notice how touched I was. "People have called me contrary for years. I'm glad to hear I'm a chip off the old block."