“I think it would have been easier if there had been bodies.” I set the root beer down. “It was the uncertainty.”
Or maybe it had been my uncertainty. As an EMT, I’d pulled dying people out of car wrecks. As a firefighter, I’d been at houses where the children didn’t get out, where the remaining person on the fifth floor refused to jump, where entire families died in their sleep.
But nothing prepared me for the emptiness of a crime scene. The moved furniture, the ruined rugs, the destroyed curtains. The toys that were pushed against the wall, the broken vases, the shattered lamps.
We couldn’t repair that stuff. Our mission was to make sure no one could tell a violent or neglected death had happened in this place. And if the family still lived there, our mission was to make the place look like it had before what we euphemistically called “The Event.”
But the Moorhead house was the first place I worked without a family to move back in or without an owner overseeing the job we did on the rental property.
No family left, no extended family leaving messages on my machine, no potential owners waiting to rebuild the place according to their new vision.
I tried not to look at the Moorhead house as I drove to my next job. It wasn’t far away — another suicide, damn the holiday season — and from the back door of a kitchen that hadn’t been cleaned since 1978, I could see the lights of the Moorhead house against the rain-darkened sky.
I tried to ignore it, to concentrate on the life lost, the loneliness that seemed to be the cause. This man hadn’t been found for nearly two weeks, which put his death on Thanksgiving Day. The remains of a small turkey and the store-bought pumpkin pie confirmed that.
He had family — an estranged wife who hadn’t seen him in nearly thirty years, two children now grown, and parents who sounded genuinely hurt when they hired us over the phone.
I’d learned, though, that genuine hurt sometimes sounded brusque or businesslike, not thick with tears. And I wondered about a man whose house was so dirty that the neighbors didn’t complain about the odor because they were used to odors coming from the place.
I never told my coworkers that I thought about the dead as if I were the last person who would remember them. Sometimes, perhaps, I was. Certainly the family of that man wouldn’t know how bleak his life was at the end. Even if one of us told them, they wouldn’t be able to imagine the piled-up papers, the half-written letters, the battered but comfortable chair in front of the TV.
I recognized this house because it was a filthy version of my own.
My place is spotless. Because my hours are long and my moods uncertain, I don’t keep a pet. I have the battered but comfortable single chair in front of a too-big television, only it’s in my basement, not the center of the living room.
If someone asked me, I’d never admit to being lonely.
Usually I don’t mind.
Except on difficult days, when I’m cleaning out someone else’s solitary home.
The invitation came two days later. The city’s annual bash, held for the contractors and private firms that kept the city running, was always a big deal. The planners spared no expense. Once they rented a yacht to follow the old ferry route across the river. Another time, they commandeered the largest, trendiest nightclub in the city. And one time — the only time (because too many people complained) — they held a beautiful secular service at the city’s historic Presbyterian church.
This year, however. This year’s site was a stunner.
Debbie handed me the invite not three minutes after the mail arrived. I was sitting in my office, enjoying a rare moment of quiet. I had that week’s checks spread in front of me. I was thinking about the bank deposit, and having a healthy bank balance at the Christmas holidays for the first time since I’d opened the business.
“Boss,” Debbie said.
I looked up. Her normally dusky skin had paled to an abnormal gray color. She held the invitation between her thumb and forefinger as if it smelled bad.
It didn’t look bad. In fact, I recognized it. We usually didn’t get formal invitations here, not the kind with the gold foil borders and the calligraphic writing.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She handed it to me. It was on a stiff cardboard stock that felt like expensive parchment. I glanced at the language, familiar after ten years of parties.
“The annual party,” I said. “So?”
“Look where they’re holding it.”
I did. And felt the blood leave my face as well.
The Moorhead house.
“Get me the envelope,” I said.
She went back to reception. I could see her through my door, rummaging through the wastebasket. When she finally found the envelope, she carried it back to me in the same way she had carried the invite itself — thumb and forefinger, as if the entire thing would infect her.
I took the envelope from her. It was made of a matching stock and had a metered city-hall postmark from the day before. If someone had sent this as a joke, they would have had to duplicate the card stock and use the city-hall postage meter, which gets guarded like crazy so that city-hall employees don’t use it for personal letters.
“Crap,” I said, and reached for the phone.
I dialed the RSVP number at the bottom of the invite. After a few rings, I got the voice mail of a person I didn’t know. I hung up and dialed the deputy mayor, Greg Raabe. We had gone to college together. We’d even dated a few times before I had found my calling and before he had met his wife.
His secretary picked up immediately, and when she heard it was me, she put me through even faster.
“Greg,” I said without preamble, “what’s this about the Christmas party being at the Moorhead house? Do you remember what happened there?”
“I remember,” he said, which was not the response I expected. I expected some political dance. The fact that he answered — and sounded disgusted — meant that he had fielded more than one call about this.
“Don’t you think this is a little inappropriate?”
“What I think doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s a done deal.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because,” he said, “the city bought the building. They plan to turn it into a museum.”
That was the thing about the Moorhead house, the thing no one talked about anymore. Shortly after the family died, the National Register of Historic Places placed the house on its registry. Apparently someone had gone through the entire historic-preservation rigmarole in the years before the murders.
Fortunately for me, the certification came after we cleaned the place up. If it had come before, the job would have taken much longer, and the city would have been billed for a great deal more money.
Historic preservation crime-scene cleaning required an entirely different use of chemicals, several kinds of oversight.
I’d managed to overlook most of that and had, in fact, forgotten it, until Greg Raabe had said the word “museum.”
The Moorhead house had been the first home built on this side of the river. The fabulously wealthy Moorheads had made their money in various enterprises in the Oregon territory, from logging to mining to trading supplies. Then they bought up the land surrounding the river, and sold it, piecemeal, to settlers coming down the Oregon Trail.
The Moorheads kept large portions of the land, however, much of it near the river, so that they could control the ferries (the only way to get across and head to Portland, even then the state’s major city). The river also gave them added control of the logging industry. In those days, logs floated down the river to be collected at sloughs which were also owned by the Moorheads. Over time, the river land became a center for what little industry the city had, and the rents made the Moorheads even wealthier.