by Gregg Olsen
“Bye-bye now,” I say, turning away from the door. I need to get on the phone with the crime lab. We deserve some help.
“Definitely not today,” the clerk says in a clipped, cold manner. “Maybe tomorrow. Call this afternoon. We are very, very busy.”
I don’t say it, but I think it: Yes, I know. Every time we ask for something you tell us that.
I return back to my desk to get my purse and jacket. Since the sheriff is out doing something, I don’t even need to make up an excuse. I slip out the back door and start my trip back to the Torrance place.
Thirty-One
Record searches—criminal and civil—turned up nothing of value on the Torrances. At least, nothing that would provide any insight. Regina had a DUI fifteen years ago and Amy was cited a couple of times for minor traffic violations. All cases were King County, where they lived prior to Snow Creek. I look at the DMV photos of the women, taken in Seattle more than a decade ago. Both licenses had lapsed. Regina’s eyes were blue. Amy’s brown. Regina was nearly a foot taller, fifty pounds heavier than Amy.
I stand on their front porch looking at a now very familiar note. I highly doubt there’s a Jared. I haven’t found one after a multitude of tries.
I study the handwriting once more: it’s bold and strong.
It passes through my mind that Merritt wrote it as a ruse.
I knock; as before, nothing.
“Regina? Amy?”
I try the knob and this time it’s unlocked. Something is wrong. I can feel it. I draw my gun from my side holster and swing the door open. I’m assaulted by the odor coming at me. The smell is worse than the cat lady’s house down the road. The air is a sweet and heavy mask, an overdose of Febreze and balsam fir scented candles. I wince. Underneath the scent is the unmistakable acrid odor of death.
Damn, I’m too late, I think, as I try to breathe from my mouth.
Merritt has been here.
I move methodically through the front room. Its tidy collection of furnishings and photos of whom based on the old DMV photos I presume to be Amy and Regina are undisturbed: Regina is sturdy and quiet pretty; Amy, the smaller, had a sweet smile and beautiful hair. Next, I sweep the kitchen. Everything is put away. The sink sparkles. A toy goat activated by the sun bobs its head up and down. I look toward the hall.
My gun is a divining rod in search of evil.
“Anyone home?” I ask. “This is the Jefferson County Sheriff. We need to talk to you.”
No response.
I make my way down the narrow, dark hall and nudge the only door open. The stench comes at me in full force. I continue to breathe through my mouth.
It doesn’t help.
I can taste something dead.
The scene comes at me in pieces, my mind trying to pull what I’m seeing together in some kind of semblance of reality.
Curtains drawn.
A sliver of sunlight leads to the bed.
A battery-operated candle flickers on the nightstand.
Two figures are on the bed, side by side; the beam of light from the window illuminates a hand. It’s small. A woman’s? A child’s?
“Regina? Amy?” I say, reaching behind me to flick on the lights, but my fingers can’t find a switch anywhere. Gun still out, I reach for the curtain and yank it open.
I gasp and suck in the foul air and nearly fall to my knees.
I see a series of pulleys and wires coming from the ceiling.
What is this? What did he do to them?
My hip scrapes a wire and the woman farthest from me moves. I lose my breath immediately, and at the same time I feel a tinge of relief.
“Are you okay?” I ask. My voice is a whisper.
Her face is hidden.
The other woman, the larger of the two, stares at me with a single eye.
A dead, lifeless one. My gun feels heavy. I nearly drop it on the floor as I steady myself.
I lean down, prod her gently. She’s gone. I do the same with the other, moving the white sheet that covers most of her.
I’ve found Amy. Or what used to be her. She’s desiccated and shiny, like a preserved mummy in a curiosity shop. Her hair is a wig. In fact, I notice several now on the dresser. Her limbs, neck and arms are strapped with fabric that holds industrial-sized cup hooks. The lines that run from her body to the ceiling are a means to move her.
Amy’s body is a puppet.
A doll.
The grotesqueness of the scene overtakes me. No matter what I’ve seen or done has never been this horrific.
A bizarre game played by one.
I can’t breathe. I can’t look. My brain is trying to make sense of it all.
As I spin around to leave, I see a folded slip of paper in Regina’s hand. It’s against procedure, I know. I take it.
I’m a ping-pong ball in the hallway, disoriented, revulsed, nearly staggering as I hurry out the door. I’m stronger than this. I say it over and over to myself. And yet, I slump on the porch. Now I’m a marionette.
The air in my lungs is purged of the vile scent of the bedroom, but my mouth still tastes the scene.
The paper remains in my hand. Actually, there are two of them. In pristine condition; treasured souvenirs of their life together, I think, as I unfold the first one.
It’s not a cherished memento at all.
It’s the kind of letter no one wants to receive from someone she loves. It’s written in a neat cursive hand, like a veteran schoolteacher who wants her students to appreciate the beauty of penmanship in a world of texting: a completely losing proposition.
Dear Regina,
You aren’t making this easy. You don’t seem to want to listen. I need you to hear me now. I love you. I really do. You will always be one of the best parts of my life.
It’s easy to see where this is going. I could stop reading now. “One of the best parts” is an inimitable beginning of a goodbye.
We did something amazing here on our farm, our piece of paradise. The two of us created a world. We really did. Remember how our friends thought we were crazy? We showed them all, didn’t we? I know that. I honor that. And, yes, I loved it here for a long, long time. But for a while now, I’ve been feeling the need for more. I can’t ask you for anything because you have given me all of you. All you have. I have so much appreciation and gratitude for you.
Here’s the hard part. You need to know this. I’m no longer in love with you. I want us to separate in the spirit in which we came together. Do you love me enough to let me go? Know that I will always cherish you, but I need to leave. I’m sorry. I really am.
Love,
Amy
Amy’s words are heartfelt. I feel sorry for her. I know about those kinds of feelings too. I left someone long ago and it was only because I couldn’t save both of us. I couldn’t be what he wanted me to be.
I know the next letter will be from Regina; a suicide note, I suspect. I start to read and it’s immediately clear that I’m wrong. This missive was written in a rage. Pen strokes made with such fury some tore through the paper.
Amy,
Goddamn you. I’m sorry that you made me lose my temper. You hurt me to the core. Just tossing me aside like I never mattered. You are my wife and you will always be for eternity. Our vows are sacred. What was this to you? Our life? Just test driving something that you didn’t want in the first place? Seriously. You confound me. You do. It’s as if we didn’t really know each other if you could keep silent for so long. I wish you would have killed me. Really. Look at me. Look at you. I don’t have an eye anymore. You did this to me. You shoved that kitchen knife into my face. I was only trying to stop you. I wanted to talk to you. Tell you that I would never love another like I’ve loved you. Look what you made me do. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I know you didn’t mean it either. I just wanted you to turn around and tell me that you would come back someday. And now… Now when I hold you it will be like it was supposed to be.
Forever.
Yes, I’m an
gry. But I forgive you. I’ll take care of you. I’ll make you happy and glad you stayed.
Love,
Regina
I press my palm on the porch step and lift myself up. My stomach is queasy. Somehow, I’ve managed to shake off what I saw inside the Torrance house. I’ve pulled myself together. Tabled the horror just enough to do my job. Still processing, but clinically so. I pull a roll of crime scene tape from the trunk of the Taurus and wrap it around the posts of the front porch. Amy wanted to get away. Maybe she felt trapped. They had no phone. There was no way she could break away. So they fought. Fought hard. Regina lost an eye. Amy lost her life. Regina preserved her body, so they’d never be apart.
I’ll make you happy and glad that you stayed.
I can’t even imagine what went into preserving the body. The last time anyone really saw Amy was two years ago.
I drive until I get a couple of bars of reception and call Sheriff.
“Holy crap,” he says, taking in every word. “Pulleys? Wires?”
“Yes. Like a marionette or something.”
“What happened there?”
“Murder–suicide. Of the ilk we’d never could have imagined.”
Thoughts of what I’d seen start to tighten my throat.
“You okay?” he asks.
“I don’t know. I really don’t. I go there to find Ida’s killer, so hopeful about that. So wanted to for her children and sister. Then… then this.”
“We’ll get Merritt Wheaton.”
I glance at the rearview mirror.
I am crying.
“You need to come back here,” he orders.
“I can do this.”
“It’s not that, Megan. There’s someone here to see you. A woman wants to talk to you about her missing daughter. Thinks you can help. And only you. She specifically said she wanted the detective on TV.”
“I’ll stay here and wait. Sounds like another fame seeker.”
“A fan, maybe,” he teases me, trying to bring me out of the darkness of my discovery. “But a serious one. Deputies will be there…” He pauses and calls out to Nan. “When will those two be there?”
“Ten minutes,” she says.
He repeats it, forgetting that Nan could work part-time as a foghorn.
“Come on back, Detective,” he says one more time.
I promise I’ll return as soon as the scene is secure. I look out as I put the car in gear. It’s beautiful here. I can hear the water of Snow Creek as it careens down from the mountains to Port Townsend Bay. I think of how I’d dreamed of a big case as I waded through the property crimes that marked my routine. I’d wanted more than anything to make something so very wrong, right. And now this. In the mostly undisturbed magnificence of the Pacific Northwest is a spate of murders, dark and ugly as any could imagine.
Be careful for what you ask.
I drive back to the house and wait for the deputies to arrive.
My car window is open halfway, and it lets in the summer air, scented with spruce, fir and blackberries. I lower it all the way. Next, I push the buttons that roll down the passenger’s side, and the two windows in the back. I want air to pass over me. I want it to clean me. To take away the residue of the work that I do. It isn’t about the way the house or Amy and Regina smelled. It is the idea of how murder in its various forms clings to people. For the rest of their lives. I’ve known this since I was a teenager.
I know it from the job I do.
My hands shake a little. This is not good, I think. Not good at all. Listening to the tapes, dealing with the Wheaton family, and now the Torrances’ murder–suicide. So much in such a little time. Maybe too much? Maybe I do have a limit.
I turn onto the main road and head to the office, hoping against hope that the woman will be brief, and the lab results will be ready.
Thirty-Two
Laurna Volkmann is waiting by the front desk. She’s in her forties, slender, with coral nails and matching lipstick. Her hair is blond and shoulder length. She’s wearing a pale pink sweater and white pants.
It doesn’t take but a beat before she’s on me.
“Detective Carpenter,” she says. “I saw you on the news.”
I nod.
“I also saw my niece.”
Right away, almost without warning, she starts to break down. I lead her to the same room where I interviewed Ruth Turner. She’s already smeared her makeup by the time we get there. I push a tissue box in her direction. She takes one, then another, and dabs at her eyes, trying her best to keep the morning’s work intact.
Laurna opens her mouth and her words come at me. Each is delivered on its own, a loose chain of what happened to her sister’s family.
“Lake Crescent.”
“Boat.”
“Accident.”
“All three drowned.”
“Hudson, Carrie and Ellie.”
“The Burbanks.”
“Ellie.”
“Never found.”
Laurna stops long enough to open her purse and take out a photograph. She slides it across the table. I look down, then we lock eyes.
“She’s a ringer for Sarah Wheaton,” I say.
“I think so. I think it is Ellie, Detective. My sister and my brother-in-law’s bodies were recovered a few days after the accident. The lake is deep. We were lucky we found them. I don’t think she’s down there. I think she’s here.”
She taps a pink nail against the border of the photograph.
“That’s her.”
“Like I said, it looks like her.”
“The detective told me after the autopsy, they had overdosed on drugs and were too stoned to save themselves. I disagree. They weren’t druggies.”
I feel for her. Family members are often clueless about what transpires between the times they see each other at family gatherings like Christmas, birthday parties, Fourth of July. What appears to be simply overindulging on alcohol on a holiday, might be a daily occurrence. I can see why Clallam County ruled it an accident. It was more than plausible. Couple with a hidden addiction drags their daughter down to the bottom of Lake Crescent, one of the deepest lakes in Washington. Over the past century, more than forty-five people have disappeared, presumably drowned, and are somewhere on the bottom of the lake.
“What do you think happened to them?”
Her gaze is now steely.
“My sister and her husband were murdered,” she says, her eyes firing at me.
“What makes you say that?”
“I found something. I told the detectives, they didn’t want to hear it. The case was closed. No one wants a story about a family dying in one of the area’s most beautiful tourist attractions. They just wanted to leave it be.”
I ask for details.
“Who do you think did it and what did you find, Ms. Volkmann?”
She takes a breath. “I think Ellie killed her parents.”
I can tell that saying those words are difficult for her. The betrayal of a daughter like that is rarely noted in the annals of crime. Matricide and patricide are almost always the work of a son.
“That’s a pretty big leap for a fifteen-year-old,” I say.
“Right. I know. Listen to me. She’d been messing up at school, chatting with boys on her phone. What’s typical today,” she remarks, “is a nightmare for any parent. So they forbid her to go out. She was mad about that. When that didn’t work, they took away her phone.”
“That’s like cutting off a teenager’s arm,” I say.
She nods. “Or their brain.”
My eyes glance back to the photograph and I ask her to continue. She tells me how the police ruled it accidental and she kind of went along with it, said she didn’t want to make a big thing of it at the time because she didn’t want anyone to think badly of Carrie.
She stops, takes another tissue.
It was the week after the memorial service at Sunset Memorial Park in Bellevue, she tells me. Laurna Volkmann directed a Guatemala
n moving crew to take some things to storage. Her sister’s house was a large one, stuffed with things that became a love/hate test for Laurna. She’d watched the Japanese expert on a TV show explain how to edit down the things that do nothing for you. That even make one anxious.
As the young men helped her ready the house for painting and staging, Laurna said, so many of the things she had elected to keep were items that had a strong connection to her sister. A pair of childhood sleds she and Carrie had used every winter even when there was only a dusting over the hillsides by their house. Pictures from a family trip to Six Flags four years ago. She also found some belongings of Hudson’s, that were precious and related to his family. As he hadn’t any family that she could remember at that time, she put all of those in a box and then found her way to Ellie’s bedroom.
Her niece’s room was beginning to show the stirrings of the transition from teen to adult. The last time she’d been there, it had been painted French Poodle Pink. And while Laurna adored the color, it was almost too much, even for her. Now, the pink was gone for a pale gray hue. So was the shelving that had once held up a collection of plush animals. In its place were books and boys. One wall was plastered with images of celebrities and Abercrombie boys, their pouty lips and eyes aimed at her.
Laurna shifted her gaze to the shabby chic desk. An open book sat just as Ellie had left it. Laurna sat still for the longest time, she told me, her home movies playing in her mind. It was like she was sleepwalking or something. Foggy. Sad. In need of another stiff drink.
She ran her hands over the comforter. It was silk and cool to the touch. Smooth. When she put her hands down to lift herself up, she felt something under the hand closest to the headboard.
It was a small notebook, spiral bound, with a unicorn sticker on its purple cover.
Ellie was still at that spot in life that teeters, sometimes unsteadily, toward adulthood.
She smiled, thinking of the girl that had been a joy until the past year. Ellie, Laurna knew, would have been her favorite niece forever, even if she had a thousand nieces. Carrie had complained a little and said that she wondered if she’d make it through dealing with a teenage daughter.
