by J. A. Jance
Mel tends to refer to her friends by first names only. I knew that Anita was somehow related to SASAC, but in that moment I couldn’t have remembered how for any amount of money.
Anita Nolastname stood up, held out a diamond-bedecked hand, and proffered a smooth perfumed cheek for an expected kiss. She was upper thirty-something, pencil-thin, and drop-dead gorgeous.
“Why, you must be the unparalleled Beau Beaumont,” the woman said with a smile. “I’m Anita Bowdin. Mel talks about you all the time, by the way. Says you’re wonderful.”
“I wouldn’t believe everything I hear,” I told her. When I glanced in Mel’s direction I saw she was blushing, and I have to confess that the idea of Mel’s talking about me in my absence put a smile on my face.
“So you’re coming on Friday?” Anita continued.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said, faking for all I was worth with what I hoped sounded like sincere enthusiasm. “Got my tux and everything.”
“Good boy,” Anita said. “See there? You’re every bit as wonderful as she says. And you’ll be at the board meeting tonight?” she asked, turning to Mel.
“Yes, I will,” Mel answered.
We didn’t say anything more until we were back in the BMW.
“So you talk about me when I’m not around?” I asked innocently.
“Don’t press your luck, buddy,” Mel returned. “Wouldn’t miss it!” she repeated, mimicking my delivery. “You’re such a liar I’m surprised you weren’t struck by lightning.”
“As a matter of fact, so am I,” I said, and we both burst out laughing.
When we arrived back at the office I got into my own car and headed out for my interview with DeAnn Cosgrove.
For years I went along with the self-congratulatory prejudice that causes people who live in downtown Seattle to maintain that the east side of Lake Washington is nothing but a vast residential wasteland. Driving across the lake and becoming instantly and hopelessly lost is a point of honor for some confirmed city dwellers. Now that I work in south Bellevue, however, I’m gradually getting over it. With the help of my newly purchased GPS, I had no difficulty making my way to the residence of DeAnn and Donald Cosgrove on the western edge of Redmond.
The house was one of a number of small neat family homes tucked onto a quiet cul-de-sac. A tiny fenced and well-maintained front yard was graced by a number of plastic vehicles and a small swing set. When I rang the bell it was answered by a woman in her early thirties who carried a relatively new baby on one hip while being trailed by a pair of what looked to be three-year-old twins.
DeAnn Cosgrove had the wan, distracted look of someone suffering through months of sleep deprivation. She wore a long-sleeved denim shirt with distinct traces of baby burp dribbling down one shoulder. Her hair was pulled back in a ragged ponytail. Looking at her reminded me of Kelly. When we’d seen my daughter down in Ashland, she’d looked a lot like that, too-weary beyond words.
“J. P. Beaumont,” I said, holding out my ID. She glanced at it with no particular interest. “I’m with the Special Homicide Investigation Team,” I added. “Are you DeAnn Cosgrove?”
“Yes, I am,” she said, nodding. “Come in. Please excuse the mess.”
She was right. The house was messy-not dirty but cluttered with laundered but unfolded clothes piled two feet deep on the couch, with the dining room table covered by a snarl of papers, and with a minefield of toys littering the carpeted floor. That, too, reminded me of Kelly and Jeremy’s place, for many of the same reasons. Taking care of kids doesn’t leave a lot of excess time for anything else, most especially housekeeping.
“I meant to shower and have this all picked up before you got here, but…” she began.
“Don’t worry about it,” I assured her. “I just came back from visiting my daughter and son-in-law down in Ashland. They have small kids, too.”
DeAnn gave me a sincere but haggard smile and then swiped an easy chair free of plastic toys so I could sit down. Then she settled into a rocker. Without practiced aplomb, she unbuttoned her blouse, covered herself with a tea towel, undid her bra, and began nursing the baby. She accomplished this while at the same time trying to cajole the twins-two impish little boys-into picking up their toys and putting them in a nearby toy box.
“So what’s this about my dad?” she asked.
I glanced at the name on the folder I was carrying. The missing person’s report for Anthony David Cosgrove had been filed by someone named Carol Cosgrove on May 19, 1980. DeAnn, the daughter, had been listed on the form by name.
“Who’s Donald, then?” I asked. “Your brother?”
DeAnn shook her head. “No,” she said. “Donnie’s my husband. Cosgrove’s my maiden name. When Donnie and I were getting married, I told him I wanted to keep my name just in case Daddy ever showed up and came looking for me. Luckily for me, Donnie’s a really practical guy. He said it made no sense to have more than one name in our family, so he changed his name to mine. His dad didn’t like the idea very much, but Donnie said he was marrying me, not his father.”
It was clear that almost twenty-five years later, DeAnn Cosgrove was still grieving for her absent father and hoping against hope that someday he would return. That kernel of knowledge was enough to break my heart. It put a personal human spin on an assignment that had been, up to that point, nothing but a list of names.
“Sounds like your husband’s got a good head on his shoulders,” I said.
An odd expression flitted across DeAnn’s face. “Yes,” she agreed finally. “Yes, he does. But you still haven’t told me. What’s this about? Why are you asking questions about Dad after so many years?”
“It turns out there are literally hundreds of unresolved missing persons cases in this state that have gotten zero attention…”
“Tell me about it,” she said.
“I work for the Washington State attorney general, Ross Connors. He’s asked my agency, the Special Homicide Investigation Team, to go through those cases and see if by cross-checking we can bring some of them to a close.”
“I’ve heard about cases like that,” DeAnn offered. “Cold cases where they eventually figure out that an unidentified body somewhere else is someone who’s been missing for a long time.”
“Yes, so if you don’t mind…”
But I didn’t even finish asking the question before DeAnn Cosgrove launched into her story. “It happened the day Mount Saint Helens blew up,” she said at once. “Daddy went fishing that weekend and never came home.”
The day Mount Saint Helens blew up. If you lived in Washington State or even anywhere in the Pacific Northwest at the time, those words conjure a day you remember-a beautifully clear Sunday morning in late spring when the mountain-one some Native Americans referred to as “Louwala Clough,” or Smoking Mountain-suddenly roared back to life after being quiet for 123 years. The initial blast caused a huge avalanche and sent up an immense overheated cloud of three-hundred-degree pumice and ash that killed every living thing inside a two-hundred-square-mile area.
“So your father was one of the fifty or so people who died?” I asked.
“The actual number was fifty-seven,” she said. “Daddy wasn’t ever counted in that official number because they never found any trace of him-no sign of him or his vehicle. But Mount Saint Helens is where he had told my mother he was going that weekend-he said he was going fishing on Spirit Lake.”
I had gone camping on the edge of that pristine lake myself years ago-long before the mountain blew up. In advance of the actual eruption-between the time of the first sizable earthquake underneath the mountain in March and when the first big eruption happened on the eighteenth of May-I remembered reading about a curmudgeonly old guy-memorably named Harry Truman-who had told interviewers that if the mountain ever exploded, he’d just go out on the lake in his boat and wait it out. There was only one problem with Mr. Truman’s plan-the lake was vaporized in that initial explosion, and so was he.
It seemed likel
y to me now that if Anthony David Cosgrove had been anywhere near Spirit Lake at the time, he had most likely met a similar fate. But I remembered, too, that investigators had found traces of many of the human tragedies left behind in the volcano’s aftermath. Etched in my memory were images of eerie shells of burned-out vehicles still smoldering in the devastated wilderness and testifying to the fact that for the people trapped inside those vehicles, there had been no escape.
In the decades since then, though, Mount Saint Helens and the surrounding area have been subjected to an almost microscopic examination as scientists study both what happened back then and what’s happening now. The area where millions of board feet of timber were felled in one cataclysmic blast is now an ongoing laboratory of Mother Nature at work, reclaiming that which she has previously destroyed.
With that in mind, it seemed strange to me that no fragment of Anthony Cosgrove’s vehicle had ever been found. Still, there was always an outside chance that something had surfaced and no one had bothered to notify his daughter. Bureaucracies are notoriously dim when it comes to taking the feelings of individuals into consideration.
By then the baby seemed to have fallen asleep. She held him to her shoulder, burped him, and then went to put him down somewhere out of sight. The process made me wonder a little. I knew that Kelly had nursed Kayla when she was a baby. Kyle, on the other hand, seemed to be a bottle baby. When we had been down in Ashland, I had noticed this and wondered about it, but there are things fathers can ask and things they can’t. This was one of the latter.
When DeAnn returned to the living room, she brought with her a small gold-framed photo of a young man wearing a vintage 1970s hairdo and equally dated horn-rimmed glasses. Grinning goofily for the camera, he held a tiny, red-faced, wrinkly baby-held her awkwardly and carefully, as though he was concerned she might break.
It was one of those standard set-piece types of photos that are part of most families. They’re usually trite, poorly lit, and unoriginal, but they’re wonderful all the same. They testify to the fact that no matter what may happen later-death or divorce, midnight arrests for shoplifting or wrecked first cars-at that point in time, that newly arrived child was a joyfully welcomed addition to his or her family.
“Your dad?” I asked, handing the photo back to DeAnn.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s the only one I have. After he was gone, Mom went through the house and got rid of most of his pictures. This is one my grandmother happened to have.”
She put the treasured photo up on the mantel, settled cross-legged on the floor, and then gathered her rambunctious twins to her as if finding solace in their wiggly presence. Having corralled their toys into the toy box, spurred on by an amazing combination of motherly prodding and patience, they now cuddled up next to their mother on the carpeted floor. With their heads in her lap and their feet sticking out in opposite directions, they gradually settled down. One of them clutched the tattered corner of a faded yellow blanket while the other industriously sucked his thumb.
Waiting for them to drift off, I tried to remember if Scott and Kelly used to do that when they were little-just fall over and go to sleep like that, regardless of where they were or what was going on-but I didn’t have a single memory I could focus in on. At the time, I wasn’t that kind of a father. Driven, intent on earning enough money to support them and also intent on drinking too much, I had recklessly squandered my own children’s childhoods. It’s something I’ve come to regret every day of my life.
“How old were you when it happened?” I asked.
“When my father went missing? I was eight,” DeAnn answered. “Old enough to be scared. It was bad enough that my father had disappeared into that awful place and didn’t come back. I saw all those terrible pictures on TV. I kept worrying that if one mountain could blow up like that, maybe the others would, too. I mean, we were living in Kent back then. Whenever the sun was shining, Mount Rainier was right there with us. At least, that’s how it seemed.”
Karen and I had been living down by Lake Tapps when the mountain blew. It had felt the same way to me, too. If God decided to send an overheated avalanche of rock and ash roaring down a mountainside at 150 miles per hour, Mount Rainier was way too close for comfort. It didn’t seem as if there would be nearly enough time to get out of the way.
“Since they never found any sign of him, I assume your father stayed on the missing list-permanently.”
DeAnn nodded again. “That’s right. I’ve always thought it would have been easier for me if we’d at least found something of him to bury. Maybe then I could have gotten over it and moved on. My mother did. She was impatient. She didn’t bother waiting around seven years to have him declared dead. She divorced him, remarried, and made a whole new life for herself, but I just couldn’t. They did declare him dead eventually, but it didn’t change anything.”
She paused while tears welled in her eyes. She pursed her lips. “He called me his princess,” she added brokenly, all the while struggling to control her emotions. “He said that one day I’d be carried away by a prince on a white horse. My mother told me Dad was just being silly and making those things up. Donnie’s a lot like him. Tells the kids stories. And he’s an engineer, too. No pocket protector, though.”
Until right then I had been doing the job Ross Connors asked me to do, but I don’t think I had really believed in it. As far as I and the rest of the SHIT squad were concerned, Ross Connors’s “missing persons thing” had us off on a harebrained tangent that didn’t make a whole lot of sense and wasn’t worth either our time or our energy. But in talking to DeAnn Cosgrove I could see that the effort was making sense to her.
“So what happened after the report was filed?” I asked.
DeAnn shrugged. “Not much,” she said. “At least not as far as I was concerned. Everyone was too worried about the volcano and what was going on with that. But somebody finally came to the house and told my mother that it was hopeless-that my father wasn’t ever coming home and she should just give up on it. And so she did. We had a little memorial service because like I said, there wasn’t anything to bury.”
I could envision DeAnn Cosgrove as a brokenhearted little girl, lost and grieving, while the grown-ups around her, preoccupied with their own difficulties, walked away from hers and moved on.
“But you didn’t give up, did you.”
“No,” DeAnn agreed. “Never. I loved him too much. I couldn’t.”
And you still haven’t, I thought.
“I miss him every single day,” DeAnn added. “I wish he could meet his grandkids-so he could tell them the same kinds of stories he used to tell me. I wouldn’t tell him they were silly, though. I’d want them to believe everything he said.”
“Where’s your mother these days?” I asked.
“Once my father was declared dead and the insurance money finally came through, she and Jack, her new husband, bought a place up in Leavenworth,” she said. “Just outside Leavenworth,” she added. “I guess I shouldn’t call Jack a new husband. He’s been around for a long time. They celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary next year. That’s fifteen years longer than she was married to Daddy.”
So Mrs. Cosgrove hadn’t spent much time waiting around for her missing husband to show up or playing the grieving widow. If they’d finally gone to the formality of having her former husband officially declared dead, it seemed to me as though someone in the world of officialdom should have noticed the transaction and removed Anthony Cosgrove’s name from the list of officially missing persons.
DeAnn apparently read my mind about her mother’s unseemly matrimonial haste. “Mom and Jack got married in January of the following year,” she said. “I don’t like the man much-never have. He’s an overbearing jerk. And we had our issues, especially when I was a teenager. That’s why I ended up living with my grandmother-my father’s mother-down in Kent most of the time I was in high school. But by then there was money coming in from Social Security, so it didn’t seem l
ike I was a burden.”
“But you said there was insurance?”
DeAnn nodded. “Quite a bit,” she said. “Some of it was group insurance and the rest of it was stuff Daddy owned. There was one smaller policy that was just for me. Donnie and I used that to make the down payment on this house.”
Insurance proceeds are often the motivator in homicide cases, but not in this one. A payout accompanied by a seven-year delay seemed unlikely, but it was still worth checking into.
“What’s your mother’s name?” I asked.
“Lawrence,” DeAnn answered. “Carol Lawrence. And her husband is Jack. Like I said, they live up in Leavenworth now. If you want to talk to them, I can get you the phone number, but I don’t see that it’ll do much good. I doubt they could tell you any more about what happened than I can.”
I made a note of their names anyway. I didn’t bother taking down the phone number. I knew if I needed to reach them I’d be able to locate Jack and Carol Lawrence’s phone number-listed or not.
I was about to put my notebook away, but then I looked at DeAnn Cosgrove and could see she wasn’t done talking. Maybe after years of not talking about it, she was ready.
“Anything else you can tell me about your dad?” I asked.
“I was always surprised that he went fishing that weekend,” she said. “As far as I know, he hadn’t ever gone before. He didn’t even like fish that much. What he liked were airplanes. He loved airplanes.”
“You mean as a hobby?”
“As in every way. That’s what he did, you see. He worked for Boeing, too, designing airplanes. I’m not really sure what he did there. I wish now I’d been older so I could have known which planes he worked on and what he did. Maybe I’ve ridden on one of the ones he helped design.”
“You probably have,” I said.
“I hope so,” she replied. I put the notebook in my jacket pocket. “So what happens now?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I may check with the people down at Mount Saint Helens and make sure that they haven’t learned something we don’t know about. And I may want to speak to your mother as well. What about your grandmother, the one who lived in Kent?”
