Amazing.
(c)2007 by Sabina Naber: first published in the anthology Morderisch unterwegs (Milena-Verlag); translation (c)2007 by Mary Tannert
The Moorhead House
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Kristine Kathryn Rusch is equally comfortable writing either mystery or science fiction. A former editor-in-chief of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, she has authored many works that belong purely to science fiction. And she is also, under the pseudonym Kris Nelscott, the author of an Edgar-nominated mystery series. Her most recent book, Recovery Man, is part of an “interplanetary detective series,” and combines her talents in both genres.
The house on the hill had Christmas lights.
I stopped beside my van — white, with DUSTY’S CLEANING lettered in discreet gold. The van was camouflage — official enough, without advertising the kind of work I actually did — but people knew anyway. Hard to miss when the guy down the street offs himself and a woman in a hazard suit, driving a van loaded with cleaning supplies, shows up a few days later.
But that day, I was alone. I was touring a cleaned scene, making sure my team had gotten every last bit. I wore my coveralls, a mask, and three pairs of gloves, but I hadn’t gone for the full treatment, thinking it unnecessary.
The neighborhood was solidly Oregon middle-class: old Victorians, 1930s bungalows, a few ranches; late-model cars, all probably bought on time; and lovely yards with only a little grass and lots of perennials. The kind of neighborhood a prospective buyer would look at and think of as a nice place to raise kids, the kind of place you grow old in, where your neighbors watch out for you and keep track of every little thing.
But I’d been here four times in the ten years I’d owned this business — for the Hansen suicide (right in the living room, where the kids couldn’t miss it. Bastard); the Palmer home-invasion-gone-wrong (the crime-scene techs had missed the cat, curled up under the stove where it had apparently crawled to nurse its wounds); the well-known Bransted murder (the little girl had been dragged into a nearby garage and gutted there, mercifully after death); and the Moorhead ritual slaughter in the Victorian up the hill.
At least, the authorities believed 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.