EQMM, January 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  At least, the authorities be-lieved it was a ritual slaughter. They never did find the bodies, although that place had four different high-velocity spatters, and all sorts of ritualistic items—knives, black candles, destroyed crosses. That was the only case I'd ever been called to testify in, mostly because the members of that cult were convicted even though no one ever found the victims.

  The murders had occurred over Christmas.

  The first time I'd seen the Moorhead place, it'd been covered with Christmas lights like something out of a Hallmark greeting. All it had needed was two feet of snow, and a few carolers out front holding their lanterns, their red-cheeked faces upturned in wholesome, rapturous praise.

  My first partner'd quit after that job. Not that I blamed her. The Moorhead job had left me shaken too, and I'm not the shakeable type. I'm a former firefighter and EMT, one of the first women in the state to do that kind of work, and I've battled both flame and discrimination with equal ferocity. I've seen what people can do to each other, and I've learned to accept it most of the time.

  Since then, the Moorhead house had sold more than once, but no one has ever been able to live there long. As far as I knew, the place had been empty for years.

  The Christmas lights bothered me.

  They were up in the same place those original lights had been, white icicles—popular ten years ago—dripping down like melted frosting off the gables and the eaves of the Queen Anne. So much like that dusky winter afternoon when I'd seen the destruction for the first time.

  Back then, I had no clue how to handle the tears that cleaning a drop of blood from the back of a lamp might bring. I tried to pretend that I was just cleaning a place, a very filthy place, and I was beginning to realize that would never really work, that you couldn't stop the brain from wondering how it must've felt to be among the screams and the crashing and the glinting knife.

  The state waited nearly a month before letting us in. By then, the place smelled like ancient rot and old blood.

  That smell came back to me as I stared at those lights, promising a festive afternoon to anyone who would just march up the hill and knock.

  * * * *

  "Who's in the Moorhead house?” I asked when I got back to the office. “Office” is too big a word for the place: That makes it sound like we all have desks and secretaries and official nameplates. In reality, I have a tiny office and the rest of the place is two rooms—the front area with a desk, a phone, and a Coke machine that Debbie insisted on, as well as a warehouse-style back room, filled with all manner of cleaning equipment, industrial-strength showers, and five commercial washer and dryer sets.

  Marcus sat behind the desk that afternoon. He's a big guy with a deep, reassuring voice, the kind folks like to hear when they've had a death in the family and decide to hire us themselves.

  "Seen the lights, huh?” he said, leaning back in his chair and folding his massive hands over his surprisingly flat stomach.

  "Yeah.” I punched the Coke machine, and a root beer fell out.

  We'd long ago bought the cola people out, filled the machine with our favorite cans, and shut off the payment mechanism. Now the thing works like an oversized (and expensive) refrigerator. I don't get rid of it, though, because it's the only nifty part of our office.

  "To be honest,” I said, popping the top, “it scared me a little."

  "Dwayne said that too."

  I'd forgotten Dwayne worked the second part of that job—when the first set of new owners somehow got it into their heads that the tiny bones in the septic system belonged to the murdered family. The bones actually belonged to a family of squirrels. But by then, the crime-scene techs had been back to the house and the lawn dug up. The mess was incredible, and the crime-scene people decided to call us.

  Not that it mattered to the first new owners. They sold as soon as the place was presentable again.

  "How come that job weirded you out?” Marcus asked.

  I shrugged, took a sip of the root beer, and said, “Sometimes I wonder why more jobs don't weird me out."

  "Nice avoidance,” he said. “Now answer."

  I smiled at him. “Because there're no bodies."

  "There're never any bodies when we go in,” he said.

  Which wasn't entirely true. There was that cat in the Palmer house and farther downtown, a stray dog left on the back porch. One of our other cleaning teams discovered an infant in a back closet, an infant who hadn't been part of the murder that the team had been cleaning up.

  But I got Marcus's point. The bodies that we cleaned up after were long gone by the time we got to the house. We always knew what happened—we had to, so that we would know where to look for debris or spatter or pieces of skin—but we almost never saw the corpse.

  "I think it would have been easier if there had been bodies.” I set the root beer down. “It was the uncertainty."

  Or maybe it had been my uncertainty. As an EMT, I'd pulled dying people out of car wrecks. As a firefighter, I'd been at houses where the children didn't get out, where the remaining person on the fifth floor refused to jump, where entire families died in their sleep.

  But nothing prepared me for the emptiness of a crime scene. The moved furniture, the ruined rugs, the destroyed curtains. The toys that were pushed against the wall, the broken vases, the shattered lamps.

  We couldn't repair that stuff. Our mission was to make sure no one could tell a violent or neglected death had happened in this place. And if the family still lived there, our mission was to make the place look like it had before what we euphemistically called “The Event."

  But the Moorhead house was the first place I worked without a family to move back in or without an owner overseeing the job we did on the rental property.

  No family left, no extended family leaving messages on my machine, no potential owners waiting to rebuild the place according to their new vision.

  I tried not to look at the Moorhead house as I drove to my next job. It wasn't far away—another suicide, damn the holiday season—and from the back door of a kitchen that hadn't been cleaned since 1978, I could see the lights of the Moorhead house against the rain-darkened sky.

  I tried to ignore it, to concentrate on the life lost, the loneliness that seemed to be the cause. This man hadn't been found for nearly two weeks, which put his death on Thanksgiving Day. The remains of a small turkey and the store-bought pumpkin pie confirmed that.

  He had family—an estranged wife who hadn't seen him in nearly thirty years, two children now grown, and parents who sounded genuinely hurt when they hired us over the phone.

  I'd learned, though, that genuine hurt sometimes sounded brusque or businesslike, not thick with tears. And I wondered about a man whose house was so dirty that the neighbors didn't complain about the odor because they were used to odors coming from the place.

  I never told my coworkers that I thought about the dead as if I were the last person who would remember them. Sometimes, perhaps, I was. Certainly the family of that man wouldn't know how bleak his life was at the end. Even if one of us told them, they wouldn't be able to imagine the piled-up papers, the half-written letters, the battered but comfortable chair in front of the TV.

  I recognized this house because it was a filthy version of my own.

  My place is spotless. Because my hours are long and my moods uncertain, I don't keep a pet. I have the battered but comfortable single chair in front of a too-big television, only it's in my basement, not the center of the living room.

  If someone asked me, I'd never admit to being lonely.

  Usually I don't mind.

  Except on difficult days, when I'm cleaning out someone else's solitary home.

  * * * *

  The invitation came two days later. The city's annual bash, held for the contractors and private firms that kept the city running, was always a big deal. The planners spared no expense. Once they rented a yacht to follow the old ferry route across the river. Another time, they commandeered the l
argest, trendiest nightclub in the city. And one time—the only time (because too many people complained)—they held a beautiful secular service at the city's historic Presbyterian church.

  This year, however. This year's site was a stunner.

  Debbie handed me the invite not three minutes after the mail arrived. I was sitting in my office, enjoying a rare moment of quiet. I had that week's checks spread in front of me. I was thinking about the bank deposit, and having a healthy bank balance at the Christmas holidays for the first time since I'd opened the business.

  "Boss,” Debbie said.

  I looked up. Her normally dusky skin had paled to an abnormal gray color. She held the invitation between her thumb and forefinger as if it smelled bad.

  It didn't look bad. In fact, I recognized it. We usually didn't get formal invitations here, not the kind with the gold foil borders and the calligraphic writing.

  "What's wrong?” I asked.

  She handed it to me. It was on a stiff cardboard stock that felt like expensive parchment. I glanced at the language, familiar after ten years of parties.

  "The annual party,” I said. “So?"

  "Look where they're holding it."

  I did. And felt the blood leave my face as well.

  The Moorhead house.

  "Get me the envelope,” I said.

  She went back to reception. I could see her through my door, rummaging through the wastebasket. When she finally found the envelope, she carried it back to me in the same way she had carried the invite itself—thumb and forefinger, as if the entire thing would infect her.

  I took the envelope from her. It was made of a matching stock and had a metered city-hall postmark from the day before. If someone had sent this as a joke, they would have had to duplicate the card stock and use the city-hall postage meter, which gets guarded like crazy so that city-hall employees don't use it for personal letters.

  "Crap,” I said, and reached for the phone.

  I dialed the RSVP number at the bottom of the invite. After a few rings, I got the voice mail of a person I didn't know. I hung up and dialed the deputy mayor, Greg Raabe. We had gone to college together. We'd even dated a few times before I had found my calling and before he had met his wife.

  His secretary picked up immediately, and when she heard it was me, she put me through even faster.

  "Greg,” I said without preamble, “what's this about the Christmas party being at the Moorhead house? Do you remember what happened there?"

  "I remember,” he said, which was not the response I expected. I expected some political dance. The fact that he answered—and sounded disgusted—meant that he had fielded more than one call about this.

  "Don't you think this is a little inappropriate?"

  "What I think doesn't matter,” he said. “It's a done deal."

  "Why?” I asked.

  "Because,” he said, “the city bought the building. They plan to turn it into a museum."

  * * * *

  That was the thing about the Moorhead house, the thing no one talked about anymore. Shortly after the family died, the National Register of Historic Places placed the house on its registry. Apparently someone had gone through the entire historic-preservation rigmarole in the years before the murders.

  Fortunately for me, the certification came after we cleaned the place up. If it had come before, the job would have taken much longer, and the city would have been billed for a great deal more money.

  Historic preservation crime-scene cleaning required an entirely different use of chemicals, several kinds of oversight.

  I'd managed to overlook most of that and had, in fact, forgotten it, until Greg Raabe had said the word “museum."

  The Moorhead house had been the first home built on this side of the river. The fabulously wealthy Moorheads had made their money in various enterprises in the Oregon territory, from logging to mining to trading supplies. Then they bought up the land surrounding the river, and sold it, piecemeal, to settlers coming down the Oregon Trail.

  The Moorheads kept large portions of the land, however, much of it near the river, so that they could control the ferries (the only way to get across and head to Portland, even then the state's major city). The river also gave them added control of the logging industry. In those days, logs floated down the river to be collected at sloughs which were also owned by the Moorheads. Over time, the river land became a center for what little industry the city had, and the rents made the Moorheads even wealthier.

  But they became enchanted with their wealth, and wanted a lot more power than owning a single small city would give them. The great-grandsons of the original family moved to Portland, where they bought even grander houses on even grander hills. Their sons became politicians, and their children became drug-addicted deadbeats who had every privilege.

  Somewhere along the way, the holdings here got sold. Then the houses in Portland went, and finally, the famous family, now down to an infamous few, had only enough left to maintain their townhouses in Washington, D.C.

  The Moorhead house, symbol of the wealth and power of a bygone age, had—even before the federal government decided to protect it—become the symbol of death and destruction in the modern age.

  "A museum?” I asked.

  "People love a mystery,” Greg said in that dryly bland voice, the one I always thought of as his political voice. “And the house is truly historical. The museum will have one room dedicated to the murders, but it'll be upstairs. The rest'll talk about city history, the impact of the Moorheads, and the way that this part of Oregon once seemed like the center of the universe."

  Then I knew he was being sarcastic. He never used that phrase in serious conversation.

  "Whose idea was this?” I asked.

  "You read about it in the papers?” he asked as if that was an answer.

  "No,” I said.

  "Then think about it."

  I did, and it only took me a minute to understand. The mayor had done this. The mayor, Louise Vogel, had set herself up as a minor dictator, much to the disgust of everyone outside of her party and even some within.

  She had the benefit of being one of the few people in the city who would take the job, which paid next to nothing for the amount of work involved. Greg had become deputy mayor as a sort of oversight position, but she had defanged him quickly. She owned much of the council, bought, I was told, with a combination of blood money and blackmail threats. The woman knew how to run small-city politics.

  "Why in the world would Louise want the Moorhead house as a museum?” I asked.

  "I have no idea,” Greg said. “Makes as much sense to me as holding a Christmas party there. So, are you coming?"

  "I cleaned the place, Greg,” I said softly. “I had to testify at the trial."

  "Oh.” He was silent for a moment. Then he sighed. “I'm supposed to jolly people into attending."

  "Has it been working?"

  "So far,” he said. “Apparently, people like to pretend they're not interested in death houses, but they really are."

  Unless they see the houses in full aftermath.

  "I suppose it'll be a grand affair,” I said, mimicking his dry voice.

  "It'll be memorable, that's for sure,” he said, and signed off.

  I held onto the phone for a moment longer, mostly to fend off Debbie's questions. As she listened to my conversation, she seemed to have gotten ahold of herself. She shook her head and shifted from foot to foot.

  I set the receiver down. “It's no joke."

  She swallowed. “Are we going?"

  The city's party was always the highlight of our year.

  "Greg says the party'll be memorable,” I said.

  "People will talk about it for a long time,” she said.

  I adjusted some of the checks in front of me. My pleasure in my unusual wealth at year's end had faded.

  "Let's make attendance optional this year,” I said. “And before anyone agrees to go, make sure they know that the part
y'll be at Moorhead house."

  "Okay.” Debbie started to leave my office, then she paused at the door. “You going?"

  "I don't know,” I said, and realized, to my surprise, that I had just spoken the truth.

  * * * *

  I suppose, politically, I should have said I was going to go. My job, after all, was to make buildings habitable again. Part of habitable was holding festive events—weddings, bar mitzvahs, Christmas parties.

  But habitable was different from comfortable. And habitable wasn't always possible.

  Places like the Moorhead house were notorious, and notoriety lingered long after the physical examples of the crimes had disappeared.

  In the end, it was my curiosity that took me there. I wanted to see the house in all its glory. I wanted to know if it could still have glory.

  And I wanted to know exactly what Louise Vogel was up to this time.

  * * * *

  No one else from the office wanted to go. Debbie actually called me ghoulish, even though I wasn't the person holding the party. Dwayne looked at me with pity, asked me if I was sure, and when I said I was, he visibly shuddered. Then he told me, quietly, that he'd never go in that house again, not even if I paid him to do so.

  In the end, Marcus went with me, mostly because he was curious. He'd been hired long after I did the first part of the Moorhead house job, but he was there for the tail end of the trial, and for Dwayne's run at the tiny bones in the sewers. Marcus told me he'd always wanted to go inside, and acknowledged that it was an unhealthy curiosity, based as much on the missing bodies as it was on the effect the entire place had had on our office.

  He picked me up at eight. I'd forgotten how well he cleaned up. He wore a long jacket over dress pants—a modern suit that harked back to the Old West—and instead of looking like a football player stuffed into his younger brother's clothing, he looked like something out of GQ.

  I felt dowdy in comparison. I wore a black velvet dress, and I decked it with a red scarf and some glittery (but fake) jewelry I'd inherited from my great-aunt. My matching black velvet heels required, of all things, dusting, and I had to run out an hour before the party to buy panty hose without runs or pulls.