I shuddered. I couldn’t help it.
Of course, Louise noticed. “Does it still bother you?”
“Sometimes,” I said before I could stop myself, “I think places like this should be burned.”
Louise frowned at me. “That’s an odd sentiment, coming from you.”
I shrugged. “There are some places,” I said, “that never get entirely clean.”
The dream came as it often did. It started with my mother. She was on the floor of our kitchen, the smell of Lemon Pledge filling the air. When she saw me, she stood, apologized, and offered to cook. I thought it inappropriate to have the newly dead make the meal, and I told her so, even though I knew I was disappointing her.
She slipped out the side door, and as she did, she said, “You’ll never see me again.”
Only as I mulled over the words, I realized she hadn’t said “see,” she had said “find.” You’ll never find me again.
Then, in the transitionless magic of dreams, I stood in the foyer of the Moorhead house. The place smelled of weeks-old blood and voided bowels. Beneath those smells was that of rotted flesh.
As I stood there, I existed on two levels: the woman standing in the foyer, and the woman who knew every inch of that house, the one who had cleaned it all and who would, if she wasn’t careful, become obsessed with it.
The walls in the upstairs bedroom had a spatter pattern that looked like a post-modernist painting. I knew that it was spray — a knife or something sharp pierced an artery, and the blood sprayed before the dying man? woman? child? turned so that the rest of the blood would shoot against a different wall.
Then the dream changed. The waiter stared at me with those cold blue eyes. I’d seen them before. Not at a party where he was curiously out of place but at the trial.
He sat in the second row from the back, and watched my every move. His face wasn’t ruddy then, but he was thinner, sadder, and his eyes had fear in them.
I couldn’t look at him as I testified. He made me nervous.
That day, everyone made me nervous.
I thought nothing of it.
You’ll never find me again.
Then the scene changed once more. My mother’s kitchen, without her body lying in the middle of the floor, looked like a happy place — painted yellow, spotlessly clean. Only a chair had moved, tilted away from the table, as if its occupant left suddenly.
Add the body to the picture, sprawled along the tile, arms thrown backward, fluids staining the clothes, and the moved chair was ominous. Had she stood because she felt ill? Or had she simply been crossing to the refrigerator when her body gave out?
Or had she been lying there, helpless, only able to slide a chair a little toward her, thinking maybe it would help her up, but the experiment didn’t work, and she remained — alone — on her back, until she breathed her last.
I sat up, not sure exactly when I woke, when the dream ended and the thinking began.
We could guess about the bodies in the Moorhead house, but we didn’t know. We didn’t know if the ritual items — the desecrated religious symbols, the black candles, the knives — had been added later to throw us off. Because they had been removed as evidence before I arrived, I didn’t even know if they’d been covered with spatter, proving they’d been in position before the family died.
I did know that they left no impression wherever they’d been. There were no knife-sized holes in the spatter pattern, no black candle wax on the side tables.
Only the blood and the stink and the sense that something horrible had happened here.
I turned on my too-large television. One of the get-rich-quick real-estate gurus hawked his no-money-down method. As house after house flashed on the screen, I wondered what secrets those houses held.
Over time, the secrets faded.
All bodies disappeared, forgotten, lost.
Did the people who owned my mother’s house now enjoy their kitchen? Did they walk easily over the spot where she had spent her last hours? Did they wonder how long her body had been there, waiting for someone to find her?
More importantly, did they care?
And that’s when my stomach turned, when the crazy food I had eaten backed up into my throat.
No one had cared at the Moorhead house party. If the murders were mentioned, it was with a salacious edge, as if the deaths were part of a setting, added for the partygoers’ enjoyment.
Five people were missing, presumed dead — presumed because no one lost that much blood and lived.
But the police hadn’t tested every drop. Only a few to make DNA comparisons, enough to build a case without a body — one of the toughest murder cases to bring. The cult — arrested, charged, and pulled off the street for life — had continually maintained their innocence.
I hadn’t been able to look at them either when I testified — malnourished, scared twenty-somethings who’d used too many drugs and lived too close to the crime scene.
People had seen them in the house, but no one had seen them on the night of the murders.
No one had seen anything that night, even though the house dominated that hillside.
Even though the house dominated the entire town.
The next morning, we had a fire-clean. Mostly smoke and water damage. The apartment, on the lower floor of a large complex, had lost its kitchen, and the rest was ruined. But the upper floors were still livable if we could get the stench out, which we could.
The apartments had been evacuated, but they still held the stuff of people’s lives — dolls scattered on a bedroom floor, slippers kicked aside in someone’s haste to escape, a half-eaten pizza on a scarred coffee table.
I surveyed the damage, realized the cleaning would be one of our easier jobs, and called in a junior team. Then I went back to the office and pulled the Moorhead files.
The image of my mother’s kitchen chair, fresh from my dream, haunted me. We had approached the Moorhead scene with a single assumption: that the family had been slaughtered there in a ritualistic way, and the bodies had then been moved.
But what if there had been no ritual? What if this had been a crime of passion? Blood was everywhere in that house, except the kitchen, an oddity explained at the time by the ritualistic nature of the deaths.
I didn’t have crime-scene photos, but I did have my photos of the scene. It was the early days of my business; I did before-and-after photos for prospective clients.
The before photos were vicious and dark, grimmer than I remembered. But the blood spatter, the filth left from violent death, was much as my memory held it — a long, continuous spray, followed by real spatter, arcing as the blood pulsed from someone’s body.
In one photo, my hand pressed on the rug, releasing the blood contained within. In another, the rivulets of blood went down the stairs, drops alongside heading away from the scene.
What had the police tested? What had they ignored?
I thumbed through until I found the bathrooms. They, like the bedrooms, were thick with blood. The toilet, the bathtub, and the sinks had light spray, but nothing inside the porcelain basins, suggesting that no one had cleaned up there.
No one had cleaned in the kitchen either.
I stared at the images, trying to recall the lesson of the dream. Take away my expectations, and what did I see?
A charnel house.
A place where blood was allowed to flow freely and for some time.
I closed the file and leaned on it, my stomach as queasy as it had been the night before. I rubbed my eyes, sighed heavily, and picked up the phone.