Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series) Read Free Page A

that mercurial career.
    It
appears that she met Ted Bransen during her third year in Hollywood—but that's
not certain—and they were married either in Mexico City or Monte Carlo or
Zurich, take your pick. It was the first or third marriage for both, and Penny
has either two or three grown kids somewhere in Europe or South America.
    I
call all that not sloppy reporting but disinformation. Someone was doing this
on purpose, to a calculated effect.
    I
am not exactly a babe in the woods in such matters. I am not really a detective
and I may not even really be psychic (because I still don't know what
"psychic" is) but I do have a pretty good grounding in the informational
sciences and I held down a desk in the Pentagon at the Office of Naval
Intelligence for several years. My family name is not really Ford but I am an
Ashton via my mother. Nobody but Mother ever knew who my father was, and I'm
not sure that she knew—but she told me once in a moment of candid humor that I
was a "son of the Ford," which is navy talk from a family with all
its proudest moments in naval service.
    One
of my ancestors was politically influential in the selection of Annapolis as
the site of the U.S. Naval Academy, but the naval heritage goes even beyond
that. Anyway, "son of a gun" is an old naval term denoting an
illegitimate child, and it stems from the early days when civilian women served
domestically on vessels of war. Since the guns were always emplaced at the
vessel's center of gravity, it was beneath these guns that such women crawled
to deliver their misbegotten offspring; thus, children of questionable
paternity were referred to as "son of the gun."
    I
know that I was not born in my mother's Ford Fairlane so she was undoubtedly
referring to my conception therein. It was either an item of delicious memory
or ironic humor that the name on my birth certificate is Ford. Don't ask why I
was not properly given my legal name, Ashton, at the rear instead of at the
front; Mother was sensitive about that and always managed to change the subject
when I brought it up. Maybe there was a problem with my grandparents. I
wouldn't know; I never met them. My mother never married and I was raised in the
Ashton naval tradition, hence Annapolis and the obligated service that
followed.
    I
give you all that just so you know where I'm coming from when I tell you that
it appeared to me that the real Penny Laker was very well concealed behind an
entirely effective disinformational cover. It is easier for women than men to
get away with something like that because few women die with the name they were
born to, and there is traditionally less legal identification of women as they
move through life.
    I
was thinking about all that, of course, as I waited for Ted Bransen to come
claim his naked wife from my bed. And I do not mind admitting that I was
feeling a bit defensive about that confrontation with Bransen. He can be a real
jerk. And I did not have a really coherent story to give the guy. So how do I
explain Penny Laker naked in my bed to her jerk of a husband?
    As
it turned out, it was a needless worry.
    Ted
Bransen did not come for his wife. He sent another. Quite another. She introduced herself as Julie Marsini and told me
that she was Penny's personal secretary. I could buy it because I'd seen her
before and wondered about her before. I'd also seen her workout suit, or one
like it, in a shop window on Rodeo Drive; she looked like she'd just come from
Jane Fonda's body salon or some such. Think of understated beauty, a woman who
takes no obvious pains either to enhance or conceal the natural
endowments—almost like one of the gray people who are always around yet hardly
noticeable, young but not too young, pretty but not dramatically pretty, well
built but not seductively displayed, interesting but not overpoweringly so. She
had absolutely raven-black hair, worn neatly at less than shoulder length, and the
darkest eyes I'd ever seen set into such fair skin.