by B. E. Scully
* * *
The next morning, Cal and Rachel walked down the pathway to look at what remained of Roy Crampton’s house. The fire hadn’t reach most of it, but everything above the doorway level was a smoking wreckage of twisted metal and blackened wood. Most of the windows had blown out, and pieces of broken glass hung onto the frames like jagged teeth in gaping, wounded mouths. Where the roof had been was now a row of burned, broken rafters, the exposed skeleton of some great fallen beast from ages past. The ash blanketing the porch and yard had drifted all the way down to the pathway. Everything smelled acrid and burned.
The window in the back corner room was gone, but the curtain with the tiny, almost imperceptible hole was still in place, fluttering like a flag of surrender.
Or victory.
On their way back home, Cal stopped beneath the twisted, smoking remains of the apple tree.
“Look at this,” he said, running his hand lovingly over the tree’s massive trunk. “It’s still alive. Scarred and damaged, but still alive.”
“What are you talking about?”
Cal looked up at Rachel as if he wasn’t sure who she was. “The tree. Look.”
Rachel leaned over to look at the place where Cal was pointing. There among the scorched, blackened wood was a branch with a scattering of stubborn color.
Fat drops of water began to spatter the leaves, revealing the shiny green beneath the thick coating of ash. Rachel and Cal both turned their faces upward to the sky.
The rain had finally arrived.
4
“Detectives? There’s a woman here to see you—name is Rachel Goodman, Goldman—something with a ‘G.’”
“Something with a ‘G,’” Martinez repeated, shaking his head. “Now that’s the kind of attention to detail that gives the public utmost confidence in its police force, right, Shirdon?”
“Whatever you say, Detective Martino. Might that be the same Goodmans of the weird red house and the missing neighbor?” Shirdon asked.
“Might be,” Martinez said. “Not to mention the other neighbor whose house almost burned down.” He turned to the young uniformed cop still standing shame-faced by their desks. “Tell her to come on in.”
“I told you there were weird vibes going on with that place,” Shirdon said.
Martinez shook his head again and sighed. “And just wait until she hears the rest of the story.”
The cop soon appeared with Rachel Goodman and ushered her into a chair. Had Shirdon not known who she was, she never would have recognized her. Her long, heavy curtain of hair had been replaced with a wavy, shoulder-length bob. Even more striking, the smiling, healthy-looking person sitting across from her was nothing like the haggard, fearful-eyed woman Shirdon remembered. This Rachel looked ten years younger than the one they had met less than two months ago.
And yet there was something else there, as well, something less sunny and bright. A new kind of sadness had crept in to replace the fear. But Shirdon saw the beginning of something else there, too—wisdom, sadness’s loyal companion, eventually catching up with its faster, harsher cousin.
Rachel sat rigid in her hard plastic chair, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. “I apologize for just barging in here like this while you guys are working…as a matter of fact, you probably don’t even remember me.”
Shirdon and Martinez exchanged a glance. After Rachel Goodman had reported witnessing her neighbor being pushed into the canal by her own sister, the two detectives actually had followed up on the case despite the lack of a missing person’s report or any other grounds for a criminal investigation. Martinez and Shirdon had given it a full month before checking back in at the lavender farm, but by that time Mary had gone missing right along with her sister. The farm had eventually been put up for sale, and according to the real estate agent handling the property, it was priced for a quick turnaround. Apparently, Mary and Mabel had decided to finally “retire in style” and move south.
“Finally had enough of the Pacific Northwest rain, I guess” the real estate agent told them. “Lots of those country old-timers are moving out or dying these days, and none of the younger folks want those big old places way out in the middle of nowhere. I can’t sell some of them at any price, and planet just fall to the ground where they stand. I guess the developers will move in once the last of them are gone.”
He gave them an address in Belize where the sisters were staying, adding, “I don’t think they’ll be there for too long, though. I think they’re planning to travel. You know, spend their twilight years seeing the world.”
“Tell me something,” Martinez asked, “did you ever see both the sisters at the same time? You know, in-person and together?”
“Come to think of it, they never came into the office together, even to sign the notarized paperwork. They always came separately. In fact, they looked so much alike I’d always have to ask them, ‘Mary or Mabel?’” he said with a laugh.
“Well, it’s possible that Mary Dell lost some weight,” Martinez said later, discussing the case.
“Or that Mable Dell gained some,” Shirdon said. “But either way, that’s a lot of weight in a few short months, Monte.”
The Dell sisters’ trail—or the Dell sister’s trail, whichever the case may be—had stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border. No mangled body had turned up at the canal processing plant or washed up along a weed-choked bank. Then again, as far as they could find out, the living, breathing Mabel Dell hadn’t turned up anywhere, either. But with no missing person report, there was little else Shirdon and Martinez could do.
Despite the Dell sister mystery, the detectives probably would have soon forgotten about the Goodmans if less a month later their other neighbor’s house hadn’t almost burned to the ground.
“How could we forget that big red house of yours?” Martinez said. “You and your husband had just moved in when we came out to look into your neighbor’s disappearance.”
Rachel frowned and looked down at her hands. “Actually, we don’t—or I should say, I don’t live there anymore.” She looked up again, but her gaze went back toward the row of windows rather than either of the detectives. “You know, I never knew the phrase ‘sheeting rain’ could actually be literal until I moved here.”
“Are you headed back to Los Angeles then?” Martinez asked.
“No, I can’t go back there. Isn’t that what they always say—‘You can’t go back’? Well, it’s actually kind of true sometimes. I might stay here in Oregon, or maybe give Washington a try. Who knows, I might even hop a ferry and keep going all the way to Alaska.” She paused and then gave a nervous laugh. “Actually, I’m headed out of town today. But I wanted to stop in before I left.” She shook her head and gave another nervous laugh. “I don’t know why I’m even telling you guys all this. I guess I just so needed to talk to someone about everything that’s happened, but every time I try to explain, it comes out sounding completely crazy. I guess you guys are used to crazy, though, in your line of work.”
Martinez shot his partner a wry look. “More than you know.”
Rachel gave him a quick glance, as if making sure she wasn’t being made fun of. “I guess it’s also because even though I know it sounded as completely crazy as everything else going on, you guys took it seriously when I called about Mabel Dell. You actually listened to what I was saying and at least tried to follow up on it. That meant more to me than you probably realize. It was like, hey, if at least someone doesn’t think I’m losing my mind, then I can’t be too far gone, right?”
“Well, some people might not think we’re the best judges of that,” Shirdon said. “But I’m glad we could be of some help.”
“You know, the lavender farm is up for sale. I saw the sign the last time I…the last time I went out to check on things. At the house, I mean. Our house. I mean…” She trailed off, once again staring out the window as if hypnotized by the steady cascade of water on glass. Then she smiled—a strange, sad little smile that didn’t reach
her eyes. “I suppose Mabel Dell never turned up.”
“We didn’t make direct contact with her,” Shirdon said. “But according to the real estate agent handling the sale of the farm, the sisters are traveling together. Seeing the world in retirement, were his words.”
But it wasn’t the Dell sisters Rachel had come to find out about. “He never turned up either, did he? Roy Crampton, I mean. They never found him or his body, did they?”
“No, they didn’t,” Martinez said. “The arson investigation team turned the entire place inside and out—house, yard, sheds—any structure left standing, plus the ashes of whatever wasn’t. They even dug up one area of the yard where the dirt didn’t look quite like the rest. But they didn’t turn up a thing. No bodies, no nothing. They eventually declared the fire accidental. They figure it must have been a spark from Roy Crampton’s wood stove. The roof was really old, and it didn’t take much for it to just go up.”
Martinez hesitated and glanced over to see where Shirdon wanted to go with this. But his partner’s face was as steady and inscrutable as the rain. If he’d had his way, they never would have had this conversation with Rachel Goodman. God knows, things had probably been hard enough for her already without adding to it. But here she was, and facts were facts. No sense hiding them even if he could.
“As it turns out,” he continued, “it looks as if the place might have been empty. Even though the fire didn’t damage the inside much—mostly just the roof and upper part of the house—there wasn’t hardly any furniture inside anyway. An old bed and mattress, a few old chairs and a pile of clothes in the one corner room—but not much else. Some food in the kitchen, but not much of that, either.”
They had Rachel’s full attention now. “But…but he was living in there. We saw him—like, every day, there for a while!”
Martinez pretended to rearrange some papers on his desk, hoping Shirdon would feel free to jump right in and help him out. When she didn’t, he said, “Well, as it turns out, the property has been in foreclosure now for almost a year.”
“A year? But that’s impossible! Absolutely impossible. Everyone along the canal way knows Roy Crampton—he’s lived there forever. They all saw him, too. We saw him in that house!”
“We’re not saying he didn’t live there,” Shirdon finally joined in. “People stay living in foreclosed houses all the time, sometimes for years before the bank finally gets around to either selling the property or tearing it down. Lots of times they don’t do either. They just let the property sit until it falls down. Kind of like what was happening to your house—or your former house, I guess it is now. Crampton might have been living there for quite some time. He just didn’t own it anymore.”
Rachel sat there as stiff and straight-backed as before, but now the hands in her lap were twisting and turning instead of lying still. “But…but no one’s left on canal way now. No one but Cal.”
“Your husband’s still living in the red house?” Shirdon asked.
But Rachel was no longer listening. She looked back toward the windows, but Shirdon guessed she was no longer seeing the rain but an odd, circular red house with a bubbling canal running behind it. And right next door, a low, flat house that looked like an old bone.
Rachel suddenly stood up. She gave Shirdon and Martinez a bright smile—too bright, yet not enough to banish the shadows. “Listen, do you guys want to see something? I mean, if you have a minute, I’d like to show you something. It’s outside, in my car—right down the street, in fact.”
She was standing there looking so hopeful that Shirdon didn’t have the heart to say ‘no.’ She knew her partner well enough to know that he wouldn’t, either, and in fact, Martinez was already out of his chair and shrugging into his coat.
Outside, the rain seemed set to stay all day.
Opening an umbrella that immediately turned inside-out from the wind, Rachel laughed and said, “I guess that’s how you tell the natives from the imports, huh? The imports are the ones with umbrellas.”
They dashed halfway down the block until Rachel stopped in front of a brand new silver station wagon and popped open the hatchback. A fuzzy brown-and-black dog bounded over the back seat and took one flying leap into Rachel’s arms.
“I know this is going to sound crazy,” she told the detectives, nuzzling the dog’s neck, “but then again, everything that’s happened in the last two months has been crazy, so I’m not sure that word has much meaning to me these days. Anyway, this is Jackson—Jackson, say hello.”
The little dog panted and squirmed in Rachel’s non-umbrella arm until she finally latched him to a leash and put him down, where he sat by her feet like a little soldier on guard duty against the two strangers.
Rachel bit her lip, wondering how to say what she wanted to say, and then just went ahead with it anyway. “One night when Cal was walking Jackson off the leash, he disappeared into Roy Crampton’s yard. I thought he was gone for good, but then the next day after the fire, almost at the exact same time I first went out and saw the flames, there he was right there on our doorstep as if he’d never left—tired, hungry, filthy, and with no collar left to speak of, but more or less intact. I don’t know if Crampton had him all along or if the timing was just wildly coincidental, and I don’t really care. All I know is that the second I saw that dog, I felt like things were going to be okay. Not just telling myself that like I’d been doing, but really believing it. Really knowing it. I’d hoped it would be okay for me and Cal—together—but it didn’t work out that way.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Shirdon said.
Rachel smiled her sad, wise smile. “I’m sorry, too, I really am. You know, somewhere along the line before I even realized it, I starting thinking of Cal as a failure—of him failing me. Failing us, himself—everything. But now I realize how selfish and stupid that was. It’s just life, you know? Sometimes it goes really good, sometimes it goes really bad, and most of the time it’s somewhere in-between. I know that sounds like the most stupidly obvious thing ever, but somewhere along the line all I could see was the bad. It’s the same with people, too—sometimes you’re on top doing everything right, and sometimes you’re at the bottom, messing everything up. It’s going to be that way no matter who you’re married to or what job or house you have, you know? I think a lot more marriages would last if people realized that before filing the divorce papers.”
“Sometimes the most stupidly obvious things are the easiest to miss,” Martinez said.
Rachel picked up the dog again and closed her umbrella. “Anyway, thanks for listening. I did originally come here to find out if anything new had turned up about Roy Crampton, but I guess I also just wanted to talk—to get everything out and maybe find some closure at the same time.”
“And did you?” Shirdon asked. “Find closure?”
“I don’t know. I guess time will tell.” She wrapped her arms around the little dog in a tight hug before putting him back in the car. “Right now, though, it’s time for me and Jackson here to get going. Again, thanks for everything.”
She opened the front door and then hesitated. “Do you believe that a house can be evil? I mean, inherently evil in its very structure?”
Martinez frowned. “I believe people who live in houses can be evil, and make it evil by association.”
Rachel nodded and then climbed into the driver’s seat. They stood and watched as the station wagon eased into traffic and then disappeared from sight.
Martinez turned to his partner. “What about you, Cass? Do you believe a house can be evil?”
“I don’t know. I believe a particular set of circumstances or forces or whatever you want to call them can build up at a particular place and time. And when that happens, a strange kind of alchemy takes place—some potent combination that just explodes into something unexplainable.”
“I guess that explains crime about as much as any other theory,” Martinez said. “It’s true what she said about marriage, though. It’s like what
’s been going on with me and Jen ever since the attack. I kept on thinking she felt like I’d failed her, but really it was me feeling like I’d failed her. And the worse I felt about it, the worse she felt about it, and the worse things got between us. It’s screwed up, the way two people who love each other more than anything in the world can start thinking all kinds of crazy, wrong-headed things about each other. And all it sometimes takes is sitting down and talking about things—being honest and really listening to each other instead of just trying to make your own points. And yet that’s the exact thing no one does until it’s too late.”
“As long as it’s not too late for you and Jen,” Shirdon said.
“Nah, me and Jen are going to stick it out. Who the hell else would put up with me?”
“Or me, for that matter. If it weren’t for you and Jen, I can guarantee I’d never, ever get invited to a summer barbeque again as long as I live. Now let’s get out of this rain before we drown.”
On their way back to the station, Martinez asked the question that had been on both of their minds ever since Rachel Goodman had said she’d left her husband. “What do you think is going to happen to Cal Goodman living way out there all by himself in that big, red house?”
“Maybe he’ll become a recluse like me,” Shirdon said.
“Seriously, though, Cass, that’s just the kind of thing I’m talking about when I bug you to get out more, to meet people and socialize a little now and then. That’s what happens when people start cutting themselves off from the world—they go bonkers all sealed up alone like some mummy in a crypt just waiting around to die.”
“Mummies are already technically dead, but I get what you’re saying. At least Cal Goodman has one consolation, though.”
“What’s that?” Martinez asked.
“At least he doesn’t have to worry about having Roy Crampton as a neighbor anymore.”
