Red House Blues (8 page)

The Sea Turtle was a block west of the
bookshop on Alaskan Way, around the corner from the Bread Of Life
Mission. She imagined that “hostel” might be a euphemism for
homeless shelter. Claire had gotten the name off the internet. But
the place turned out to be clean enough and seemingly well run.

To the left of the door was a whole rack of
tourist flyers and maps, plus the expected information on how to
find social services and public restrooms downtown. The guy at the
desk had the moth-eaten look of a down at-the-heels panhandler
coming off a weeklong drunk. But he was accommodating enough,
signing her in and handing her the key for room Two-B. Which, he
mentioned, she would be sharing with three German women traveling
down the coast from Vancouver. They were out sightseeing so Suzan
should have the room all to herself if she wanted to get settled.
He didn’t offer to carry her pack. Self-sufficiency was what
hostels were about.

Two-B room was cell-like, the window wall
sandblasted red brick with a small sash window flanked by two
gunmetal gray bunk beds. She located her assigned bunk right away.
It was the one without underwear and hiking socks drying on the
rails. Home sweet home.

There were four Army surplus-type metal
lockers on the wall opposite the window. Suzan found an empty one
and hung up her two shirts and spare pair of jeans, stacking her
underwear on the top shelf. It somehow brought to mind Sean’s jail
stay. Funny, how when Sean was in jail she had never spared a
thought to what it must have been like for him, the tiny cells and
regimented meals. At least he hadn’t had to walk down a long spooky
hall to the toilet.

As uncomfortable as the
bunk appeared Suzan flopped onto its olive drab blanket, totally
exhausted in spite of the nap she had taken on the train. Or maybe
because of the nap. She hadn’t had time to think of that nasty
dream. It probably meant nothing beyond being a rehash of whatever
insecurities were fermenting in the back cupboards of her mind. But
the whole thing had left a bad taste. She could still see Sean’s
corpse floating toward her through a prism of green pond water.
What would Claire think of the dream?
Probably that it’s a warning to get my fanny back to
Bellingham and stop chasing this particular ghost. Maybe she’s
right that I haven’t thought this thing through but I’m here
now.

What to do first? Good question. How about
something to eat and a look around the neighborhood. Then first
thing in the morning march the grieving widow in to see the
police.

Suzan followed Michelle’s advice and treated
herself to a mushroom burger at the J & M Cafe up the street.
It ran to more than she wanted to spend but Michelle the bookshop
guru assured her the cafe was one of the original businesses in
Seattle and a “must see”. She reminded herself she wasn’t here on
vacation. It would be so easy to get sidetracked into tourist mode,
to forget her purpose in coming to Seattle. If only she could
forget.

The next morning she was disappointed to
learn that Paula and Keith, the two police officers that had
delivered the bad news in Bellingham were unavailable to meet with
her.

“You should have called,” said the woman at
the desk, stating the obvious.

“Is there anyone at all who might be free to
talk to me about the investigation into my husband’s murder? I
haven’t heard anything for months.” The oh-poor-me tactic seemed to
hit the right nerve with the woman.

“I’ll call around and see what I can find
out,” she said, managing the hint of a sympathetic smile.

She found an officer from homicide who was
reasonably willing to share some information, after he checked out
Suzan’s identification and made a few calls. Suzan imagined he
called Paula and Keith. But after jumping through the hoops all she
got of any use was affirmation that the 111 Fir Street address on
the FedEx boxes had indeed been where Sean had lived.

She was also given the name of the band Sean
had been playing with when he died. Scalplock. Charming, thought
Suzan. An Indi-Punk band, or so said the officer. Back in
Bellingham Sean had gravitated more to the lyrical side of classic
rock guitar. Sean was never a head-banger by any stretch, even when
he was drugging. At least not when Suzan knew him. He was more into
Dylan, Santana, Clapton, Hendrix. Acoustic mostly. Romantic, she
thought. Then all of a sudden he’s in Seattle playing in a Punk
band called Scalplock? There seemed to be quite a lot she hadn’t
known about her husband.

“Anything else we can help you with, Mrs.
Pike?” said the officer, apparently eager to get back to his more
promising homicide-related activities.

“Do you know if any notebooks were found
with my husband or in his room?”

“Nothing here,” he said, ruffling through
the file. “I can ask the detective in charge but your husband’s
effects were cataloged into the evidence room, and there’s no
notebook listed.”

It had been a long shot anyway. Of course
they could be holding back information during the investigation but
chances were there had been no notebooks. The officer said
Scalplock had been playing at Jax’s, a Punk bar on Fifth, the night
Sean was killed. Suzan wasn’t ready to show up at the Fir Street
house so Jax’s seemed like an obvious place to start.

Chapter 8

Seattle - 1930

Martin missed the first step, barking his
shin in the dark. Rosemary hadn’t seen fit to leave the back porch
light on for him. But he did notice through a rotgut haze that the
kitchen light was on. She was waiting up for him. Going to give him
what for. Well, he wouldn’t stand for it. He was still the man of
the house, no matter what she might think. Man didn’t have to give
up being a man when he was down on his luck. Didn’t he have the
right to cut loose a little when he got a few dollars? Not right.
Nobody else was working. She didn’t have any call to be so high and
mighty all the time. She was taking in goddamn laundry from the
goddamn bloodsuckers on First Hill, for chrissake.

The kitchen door was unlocked as it always
was. Rosemary was hunched over the rickety ironing board smoothing
wrinkles from a damask table runner. She didn’t look up as her
husband stumbled through the door.

“Why are you wasting electricity up to all
hours? Costs money, damn it,” he said.

“Why are you wasting money drinking till all
hours, Martin? At least my ironing puts food on the table.”

“Here it comes. The goddamn ironing. Rub my
nose in it every time you get the chance. I’m sick of it,
Rosemary.” And sick of you, he thought to himself.

“That’s fine with me, Martin,” she said.
“Because I stayed up to tell you I’m leaving. Right after I deliver
this basket of linens to Mrs. Phelps I’m packing up and going to
live with my sister in Cincinnati. I’ve had all I can take. The
bank called again today. They are foreclosing, Martin. They are
taking this house and I can’t stop it. I don’t make enough to make
up the back payments you didn’t make.”

“Well, good riddance, I say. Ever since we
moved into this damn house things have gone from bad to worse. Good
riddance.” He sat down hard in the strait backed kitchen chair.
“Run off to that rich bitch sister of yours. If she’d loaned us the
money like I asked her, I could have paid the bank. As long as I
had a good job at the mill, butter wouldn’t melt. Then the mill
shut down and all of a sudden I’m poison. There’s loyalty for you.
You deserve each other.”

Rosemary put the iron down at the end of the
board and saw her husband sitting there in the stiff oak chair,
looking like he could topple out of it and onto the green linoleum
any second. How small he seemed sitting there like that. Once, too
long ago, he’d been confident, strong. The mill had been booming
then and he had hopes of expanding down to Tacoma. They bought the
old house on Fir and started fixing it up, adding a second bathroom
and installing modern electrical wiring. Their dream home. People
could afford a dream or two before the crash. She had loved him.
Perhaps she still did, but it didn’t matter anymore.

“Martin, it’s not about loyalty. There is
nothing else I can do. Don’t you see, maybe you’ll be better off
without me right now.”

“Sure, and maybe I can just go down to
Hooverville - find myself a nice cardboard box to live in. Is that
your idea of better?”

“There is still some work to be had, Martin.
You’ll make do if you don’t have to worry about supporting the two
of us. You could work a few hours here and there until things turn
around. When you are working steady again I can come back. We can
start over,” she said.

“That’s your idea, Rosemary? I should
scrounge food behind the soup kitchens? I should shine shoes and
collect firewood on the tide flats like a bum? I ran the biggest
mill in Seattle! I’d be a laughing stock. Is that what you want?”
he said.

“I’m not laughing. I don’t see a thing
that’s funny here, Martin. You don’t want to collect firewood like
a bum? Take a look at yourself. You are worse than a bum. Every
dime you can put your hands on goes for bathtub booze in some
speakeasy on First Avenue. You disgust me the way you are,” she
said.

How it happened he didn’t know but suddenly
he was out of the chair, grabbing the iron off the end of the
board. He just wanted her to stop talking. He couldn’t stand to see
that look of pity on her face. He saw it in her eyes. He was a
failure. Useless. She’d gone too far. He swung the iron at her
mocking face.

She fell sideways against the sink. There
was a sound like a branch snapping in a storm. He didn’t understand
what it was at first. Then Rosemary slid to the floor. It all
happened so fast.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her, lying
there so still, blood flowing out over the floor beneath the sink.
He knew there must be something he should do. He sat back down on
the kitchen chair. He had to think what to do.

He hadn’t meant to hurt her. He knew that.
He’d never hit Rosemary before, ever. He wouldn’t ever hurt her. It
wasn’t her fault. It was his own miserable bad luck. Like a curse.
First the mill, then the house, now this. His stomach lurched and
he wanted to be sick, as if that would help anything. If only he
could vomit up all the bad luck like a bad batch of booze and
everything would be set to rights again. It was like a sickness,
this bad luck. He didn’t deserve it but now it was eating away
everything he once was. And there is no way to fix it, no way to
fix this. The police will come and they would know right away what
happened. He killed his wife. He could say it was an accident.
Maybe they’d believe that. But, no. She was hit with the iron
before she fell. Anyone could see that. He’d go to jail at the very
least. Maybe he would hang. He deserved to hang. He was a
miserable, murdering drunken failure.

Martin, sitting in the kitchen chair,
looking at the corpse on the floor, did not feel the infinitesimal
tremor that wormed its way up through the house’s foundation,
through old-growth timber beams into the heavy fir flooring, up
through lathe and plaster. The tremor was like incoming tide
sliding in over the marsh flats. It was like a creeping fungus, its
mycelium enveloping the wooden structure that encapsulated the man
sitting in the oak chair. Even if he had not been buried in his own
thoughts he might not have perceived so small a shiver, so gently
did the house stir. It could not have been called an intelligence,
no more than a virus, or a sudden electrical discharge from a
cumulous cloud could be called an intelligence. Whatever its
genesis, whether chemical reaction or some supernatural confluence,
it existed because it existed in that particular place, within each
cell and dust mote of the house on Fir Street. It functioned as it
had always functioned from its inception and would always
function.

But Martin Childers knew nothing of this.
Had he had an inkling of it he would have passed it off as the
inevitable consequences of a night drinking up what little money he
was able to pry from his wife. Or the onset of madness. For what
else could he think but that he had gone crazy to do what he had
done?

It must have been two or three in the
morning, he didn’t know. How long had he been sitting there? His
hands were still shaking. The dark smears down the sink were dry.
He got up, pulled the damask tablecloth from the ironing board and
placed it over Rosemary’s ruined face. Even as he did it he knew it
was a silly thing to do. But he couldn’t have her staring up at him
like that. Didn’t want her seen like that when they came and found
her.

He went through the dining room and up the
stairs to their bedroom off the first landing. There, he pulled the
bedding off the bed and tore a sheet into strips. He knew knots.
Hadn’t he put in his share of work with the fishing fleet when he
first came to town? Back when there was a fishing fleet worth the
name. Seemed like so long ago. Always a handy thing to know, knots.
Who would have thought he still remembered. Never know when
something a man learns will come in handy. His hands were not
shaking quite so much now.

He went back to the landing and tied things
up good and tight, admiring anew how well the old house was built.
They built to last in those days. Whoever put this thing together,
really knew what he was doing, he thought. Then when everything was
in place Martin climbed over the glossy walnut banister and let
go.

Chapter 9

Her bunkmates at the Sea Turtle were
eighteen-year-olds on the German equivalent of senior trip, intent
on turning the entire night into one Wagnerian slumber party,
complete with smuggled beer. Suzan was outnumbered and feeling like
an ancient shipwreck. After pleading for quiet until her voice gave
out she gathered up pillow and blankets and padded down the hall to
the bathroom. It didn’t look too comfortable but it was quieter.
She locked herself in one of the shower stalls, wrapped up in the
blankets and curled up on the damp tile floor.