Homicide My Own Page 12

  Odd and I looked into our plates.

  Houser nodded in Odd’s direction and said, “Him.”

  The fork in Gwen’s hand started to shake. Pieces of mac ‘n cheese fell back to her plate. She laid down the fork and folded her hands in her lap.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand anything.”

  I brought them all up to speed. I don’t know why. Maybe because arrangements would eventually have to be made, and we were a group now, whether we liked it or not.

  I expected some skepticism. I would not have been surprised by derisive laughter. Instead, all three of them gave my news the most serious kind of attention. Not that any of them, or either of us, for that matter, knew any more about past lives than what we had seen on TV talk shows: middle-aged women claiming to have been Cleopatra or Marie Antoinette. Or phoney channelers talking in fake voices to ancient masters, for a fee. Or psychics who could make that long distance call for you to your dearly departed, if the price was right. I never saw a psychic yet who could tell you what the weather would be like two weeks down the road.

  Nobody jumped on that end of it, though. It was the double-murder itself got to them. If Odd had an inside track, and it seemed very much that he did, then he had to go with it, take it to the end and bring down the son of a bitch who blew away those two kids. On that, there was consensus, with one possible hold-out, me.

  Stacey, especially, got into it, identifying with Jeannie, and confirming from her own raging hormones that Odd was surely right in his belief that it was an older man, and that the motive was jealousy.

  “Here’s the thing,” she said. “If she hooked up with some other guy, she told somebody. You have to, you can’t keep a thing like that to yourself.”

  “You told somebody...about us?” asked Houser

  “Duh. I told Britney. I tell Britney everything.”

  “I told you not to tell anyone. You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  “Anyone but Britney. You didn’t tell anybody?”

  “No,” said Houser, “are you crazy?”

  “Well...well... Britney saw me writing your name in my secret notebook and she made me tell.”

  “You wrote my name?”

  “A thousand times,” she said. “I loved you.”

  Houser looked like a man contemplating suicide by mac ‘n cheese asphixiation.

  “Odd,” I said, “you mentioned a secret notebook.”

  “I did?”

  “When we were talking to Karl Gutshall. You said he tried to break into your...into Jeannie’s locker and read her secret notebook.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  Joan Osborne was singing...about God, of all things.

  “Do all young girls keep secret notebooks?” Odd asked Stacey.

  “For sure,” she said.

  “I wish I’d known that,” said Houser.

  “Did you?” asked Odd, of me. “Keep a secret notebook?”

  I could still see it, after all these years, pink, full of swirls, in each swirl a dream, but those I did not remember, not the dreams, just the swirls, so many of them.

  “Even I did,” said Gwen.

  “Mom, please,” said Stacey.

  “Well, I did. I’m not going to tell you what was in it. That’s for me to know and nobody to find out.”

  “If she boinked the guy who killed her,” said Stacey, “she told someone. Word. And the name of the guy is written in her secret notebook. If that notebook is still around...”

  “What if God was one of us...just a slob like one of us...just a stranger on the bus...tryin’ to make his way home...”

  I pushed my chair back and hurried outside to the porch. I hoped not to go crazy again. I hoped not to run into the sea. I hoped not to do that ever again. I went to the end of the overhang and cried into my hands like a lost little girl. Odd came out and stood next to me. He put his arm around my jerky shoulders and gave me a hard squeeze. He was a big Swede, six-two, three.

  “I miss the tough little broad I used to be,” I said.

  “Oh, you were never all that tough,” he said.

  “Tougher ‘n this.”

  “That song always makes me cry too.”

  I managed a chuckle. He was a funny kid, that Swede.

  “You shouldn’t have left those two alone,” I said. “She’ll be on her knees under the table.”

  “Her mother’s watching her.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s been doing a great job so far.”

  “I still have to go to Jeannie’s house,” he said.

  I nodded. “I have to go with you.”

  “You don’t, really. You can stay with the prisoner.”

  “Hell, let’s just bring him along.”

  “What about the other two?”

  “Not our problem. They can eat shit and die.”

  “Ah, you’re back.”

  Gwen, as it turned out, was content to sit in the cottage but Stacey put up a fight, insisting that she could help with this. She petitioned us up to the car door, where we locked Houser in back and shut her out. She hopped gingerly on bare feet on the gravel as Odd backed the car around, still trying to worm her way along. We left her there.

  We passed The Cedar Farm, where they sold siding and decking and other stuff made out of cedar. We saw three, four beater cars parked with For Sale signs on them. We took a left on Early Dawn Street, a right on Pullorbedamned Road, and another left on Sunset Boulevard. Odd seemed to know where he was going, God knows I didn’t. We passed a place that sold top soil and a place that sold gravel, and every place like that we passed was making me homesick. Not for Spokane, for Shenandoah, where they also struggled to survive on dirt and stone, and where I knew the lingo and everyone settled for just one life and the reward that was promised to follow.

  Out of nowhere, Odd said, “The house is white,” in a flat voice. ”There is a screened-in porch. With an iron glider and a thick pad on it. On really hot summer nights you could sleep on that. In the back there’s a deck where you can watch the deer. She always planted a little patch for them.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who lives there. It was a deal she made with them, with the deer. Eat out of your own patch and leave our garden alone. It seemed to work.”

  Da frick.

  “She’ll offer us cocoa,” he said.

  “Cocoa? Who drinks cocoa?”

  “She’ll be embarrassed that the house isn’t cleaner.”

  “I know I always am. Where will the secret notebook be?”

  “In Jeannie’s room?”

  “You asking me?”

  “Unless she burned it.”

  “She wouldn’’t do that,” said Houser, who had kept quiet up 'til then.

  “No, I don’t think so either,” I said.

  We entered a cedar-lined street of old wood-framed houses, and Odd pulled into a driveway without hesitation. The house was white, as he said it would be. There was a screened-in porch. Odd got out of the car like a sleepwalker. I locked the doors and ordered Houser to sit tight.

  Inside the house, the lights were on. We opened the screen door to the porch. An iron glider was at the far end, as Odd said it would be. He was taking everything in. I rapped smartly on the door. A small dog barked. In a minute a woman cautiously opened the door a crack. Her hair was a rich natural white.

  We held out our ID’s and I told her who we were and where we had come from. Her eyes knitted up in confusion. Odd was in some sort of rapture. “Do you think we might talk to you for a little while?” I asked.

  “What is it about?” she asked.

  “About what happened long ago.”

  “About Jeannie? Why would the Spokane police...?

  “They wouldn’t,” I said. “It’s us. Odd here, really. Could we come inside? It’s complicated.”

  She looked at Odd, and I thought she looked at him with some kind of recognition.

  “Yes, of course. I’m sorry.
I’m a little...”

  “I understand. You weren’t expecting this.”

  “No...I wasn’t.”

  She opened the door wide, holding back a little black and white terrier. We went into her house.

  “You caught me by surprise,” she said, “the house is a mess.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “You should see mine. You’ve got a lovely house here.”

  “Thank you. Please, sit down.”

  She sat on the edge of the settee, a little nervous, and with some difficulty. She was in her early seventies and might have had some ostioporosis, but her eyes were bright and she had a healthy complexion.

  Odd sat in a wide-armed tattered overstuffed chair, which had to have been the favorite of the man of the house, now deceased, and he smiled a broad smile that neither he nor any of his Swedish forebearers had ever even known was possible. Had I seen it on the streets of Spokane I would have thought someone was trying to start something.

  He was home again.

  The old lady smiled back at him.

  The terrier jumped up on Odd’s lap and snuggled in.

  “Oh, Otis,” she admonished the dog. “Just shoo him if he bothers you.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Dogs like him,” I said.

  “Some people have that,” said she. “Jeannie was that way, dogs, cats, fawns... Would you like some cocoa?”

  “Maybe later,” said Odd.

  Do the math. He had it all right, batting a thousand.

  “Well, then...” She waited for us to explain ourselves, but Odd seemed content just to sit and look at her. I would have to start the ball rolling, and of all places to start, I don’t know what possessed me to ask, “Mrs. Olson, did your daughter Jeannie ever have trouble sleeping?”

  It startled her.

  “Yes, especially the last few years...we were worried about it. When she was twelve she started thrashing in her sleep. Her bed in the morning was a tangle of sheets and blankets. But she never seemed aware of it when she awoke, so I thought maybe she was going through a growth spurt or something and it would pass. It was about the time her periods started.”

  “”Really?”

  “Why in the world do you ask?”

  “If you could just indulge us...”

  “I really don’t understand why you’re here,” she said.

  I told her, in broad strokes, why we had come to Shalish Island, and how we came to stay longer than we had anticipated. How Odd was drawn to the picture of Jeannie and James on the wall of the tribal police headquarters, and how one question led to another, until we began, that is, Odd began to have certain insights into what might have occurred, that is, details about how it occurred. I didn’t tell her what those details were, or how he came to have insight into them, or that we had a perp and a perv outside in our car. I had to leave something for Odd to tell her.

  “Daddy took it hard, didn’t he?” Odd asked her.

  “Daddy?”

  “Jeannie’s daddy. He took it very hard.”

  “He was the third victim of that, really,” she said. “Every evening he would wash the car, treat the rubber, the leather, polish the chrome...every evening. It’s all he could do. It was a ‘65 Mustang that he had planned to give to Jeannie for her graduation, that she could take with her to college. Then he would pull it into the garage and hose down the driveway until not a leaf or a pebble or a twig remained. We had the only spotless driveway on the island. One evening after he did all that, he sat down on the wet driveway and died.”

  “I’m sorry he had to go through so much suffering,” said Odd. “But it’s over now.”

  “Yes, yes, it is.”

  “Jimmy’s parents think Karl Gutshall is responsible,” I said.

  “I know they do, but I just can’t imagine Karl doing such a thing. He was broken hearted when Jeannie broke up with him, yes, but he would never hurt her like that. If you ask me, he’s another victim.”

  “Do you have any ideas who might have done it?” I asked.

  “No, none at all. Everyone just loved to be in her presence. She had a glow that everyone wanted to be within. This island has never been the same without her, and that’s not just because I was her mother.”

  “Yes,” I said, “we’ve heard how special she was, the effect she had on people.”

  “You know,” said Odd. “I think I’d like that cocoa now.”

  We followed her into the kitchen, and as she made the cocoa, Odd’s eyes travelled over the counter, the table, the stove, and all the appliances.

  He opened the door to a counter-top toaster-oven. “This is new,” he said.

  “That? No, it’s ten years old if it’s a day.”

  We talked about that terrible night. I was pretty much convinced by now that this lady was Odd’s mother in another life. I surrended, I accepted it, I waited to see where it would take us. We sat down at the kitchen table and drank the cocoa, which felt thick in my mouth.

  “Mrs. Olson...can I call you by your first name?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course you can.”

  “What is it, your name?”

  “Janet,” said Odd, simply, and sipped his cocoa, a long lost man with his big hands around a familiar mug, an affectionate dog sleeping on his lap.

  “Yes, that’s right, my name is Janet.”

  “We’re not here, Janet,” I said, “in any official capacity, but this is more than a matter of curiosity to us.”

  “Do you...have some idea... who did it?” she asked, tentatively.

  “No, but it may be possible now to find out.”

  “But how? It’s been thirty-three years.”

  “Well...we might have an eye witness,” I said.

  “What? After all these years...?”

  “There was a twelve-year-old boy had a crush on Jeannie,” said Odd.

  “Oh, all the boys had a crush on Jeannie. Did he see it, this boy?”

  “He might have,” said Odd.

  “But that’s not the eye witness we have in mind,” I said. I wanted the other shoe to drop, and drop soon, but I didn’t want to freak her out.

  “He was a serious little guy,” said Odd, “followed her around all the time, too afraid to talk. Jeannie towered over him.”

  “Gosh, it could have been anybody.” She thought for a while and said, “I do remember....a little Indian boy.”

  “Yes! It was an Indian boy, a very shy boy, and Jeannie was the first girl he ever felt that way about. Do you remember his name?”

  “Lord, it was so long ago. Maybe it will come to me. But how do you know about that?”

  “Ah, Janet, yes, that’s the hard part to explain,” I said, wishing Odd would take a crack at it and get it over with.

  “Her room...” said Odd, “first door on the right at the top of the stairs. What’s in there now?”

  “It’s still her room. We had no other use for it. We had no other children.”

  She was speaking reasonably but I could see in her face a new level of confusion and fear, and she looked only at Odd, who casually scratched the terrier’s neck.

  “Could we see her room?” I asked.

  She led us upstairs. The doors were all open. A sewing room at the top of the stairs, the master bedroom and the bathroom to the left, and Jeannie’s room to the right. She went in ahead of us, and Odd seemed to falter at the last step, then regained himself and went into the room. It was a small room, with windows to the street. The bed was nicely made and populated with several stuffed animals. The dresser was maple and tucked into the mirror’s framing were yellowing photos that once meant something to a young girl. A cedar chest was at the foot of the bed. On the floor was an old style hi-fi set and on either side of it stacks of vinyl albums. There was a small bookcase with high school mementos placed among the books. In the far corner of the room was a door, which I assumed was the closet.

  I took it all in, in just a second, and focused on Odd’s face, looking for the fl
ash of recognition. I believe Janet Olson was doing the same thing. We were both waiting for him to say something.

  “It’s small,” he said. The remark was anticlimatic. But I remembered the first time I went back home to Pennsylvania after many years on the west coast and went into my old room. My reaction was exactly the same. It seemed so much smaller than I remembered it.