She had a point, one I didn’t care to think about.
Then one afternoon shortly after Halloween I had to go to the Moorhead house for the final time.
I went with various attorneys — the D.A., several assistants, and defense attorneys for a variety of clients from the waiter to the cult. Someone had found the youngest son in Miami, but he hadn’t given up the rest of his family. His very presence — alive — in another state was enough to place doubt on the entire cult-killings story.
He wasn’t represented by an attorney, so far as I knew, but I didn’t ask a lot of questions.
Instead, I answered them, explaining what chemicals I had used, defending myself and why I hadn’t noticed the irregularities in the spatter, the extra blood, the lack of footprints.
Over and over again, I said simply that it wasn’t my job.
And it wasn’t. I was supposed to clean, not think. I was supposed to make the place livable again, and I had.
I had done everything I’d contracted to do.
Maybe that was why the house had haunted me so. Why I had dreamed of it, why the blood kept reappearing on the walls — not as if it couldn’t be buried, but as if there was too much of it to contain.
My subconscious had known.
My conscious mind had refused to accept anything but what it had been told: A family had been murdered by their neighbors, a murderous cult, and the bodies hidden.
Differing interpretations of the same evidence, evidence not examined closely by any of us.
Except the brother, who had made two mistakes. First, he had come to the trial — nervously and obsessively worrying — to see if anyone had found the planted evidence. Or maybe he was stunned and appalled that a case with no bodies generated enough evidence for a conviction. Maybe the family had merely meant to harass the cult, not destroy their lives.
Then he had come back to the house, deliberately getting hired, just so he could see the site of his — and his family’s — triumph. Or maybe he had still been worried, still afraid that he would get caught. Maybe he was guarding the place, hoping that no one figured it out.
Or maybe he simply couldn’t stay away.
Like I couldn’t.
I take evidence of a hideous event and make it vanish. I call that healing, but really, it’s just masking. The event remains. It is history; it has happened. I allow people to pretend everything is all right.
What happened in the Moorhead house that day was the opposite of what I do. That family had used a masking technique to get revenge on people they hated, and in the process, managed to disappear with no consequences at all. They left debts, and dozens of families in ruins.
They left a chair pushed out, and knew that we would assume the worst.
We prosecuted based on that assumption, and received a conviction. And I cleaned up the mess so thoroughly that we have to use photographs and cut pieces of rug, miraculously saved. We can’t revisit the scene with Luminol, trying to see what had happened before, because I smeared it trying to make the home safe, trying to make it — and us — forget.
We’ll never know for certain what happened in that house. Just like we’ll never know why another neighbor down the street finished his pie last Thanksgiving and then took his own life.
Just like I’ll never know how long my mother lay on the floor of her kitchen, conscious and hoping someone would find her.
We can clean the mess, but the uncertainties remain.
There are Christmas lights around the Moorhead house this year, but there will be no party. It’s not in the budget. Once the appeals are over, once the trials have ended, the house will become a museum, just like Louise dreamed.
But people aren’t going to go inside to look at one of the city’s first houses, thinking about old Josiah Moorhead and the power he had because he had the foresight to build ferries that crossed the river. People will go into his house to see if they can find that one piece of evidence, that one spot of blood, that one thing I might have missed in my thorough cleaning, hoping to see if they can solve the case that nearly cost a group of rowdy and unconventional young people their lives.
I won’t go back. I’m not going into any damaged houses anymore. I’m strictly management now — assigning teams, paying bills. I can’t look at interiors filled with the leftovers of other people’s lives and worry that something important has been missed.
I don’t want that responsibility.
My imagination is too strong, my memories too fresh.
I don’t need any more ghosts.
I have enough already.
A Gateway to Heaven
by Edward D. Hoch
The protagonist of this new story, Susan Holt, is a seldom seen Hoch character. But last year “A Convergence of Clerics” (December 2006), a tale featuring the amateur sleuth, placed third in EQMm’s annual Readers Award competition, inspiring the author to bring the crime-solver back for another case.
It had been a long time since Susan Holt had thought of Mike Brentnor, who used to work with her in the promotions section of Mayfield’s Department Store. Susan was director of promotions now and Mike had fallen off her radar years ago. That was why it was such a surprise hearing his voice on the phone that balmy May evening.
“Susan? How are you? It’s Mike.”
She hesitated, thumbing through the index of her memory before asking, “Mike who?”
“Mike Brentnor! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me!”
“Of course not, Mike. But it’s been a lot of years. What are you doing now?”
“This and that. Right now I’m promoting the new racetrack they’re building near the Catskills. I was wondering if I could buy you a drink.”
There was a time when they’d been friends, but that was long over. “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Mike. I’m pretty tired after a day at work.”
“It’s nothing personal. I want to talk about a business deal.”
“Mike—”
“How about lunch tomorrow? At that place across from Mayfield’s?”
She smiled into the phone. “You’ve been away too long, Mike. That place, Sandra’s, is long gone. It’s a drugstore now.”
“Where do you eat lunch?”
“Most days I skip it, or send out for a sandwich.”
“You’re missing a good opportunity, Susan.”
For what? she wondered. A roll in the hay? But she relented and said, “I could meet you for a quick drink tomorrow after work, but I’d have to leave by six-thirty.”
“Fine! Whereabouts?”
“Nathan’s is as good as any place. Five-thirty?”
“Swell! I’ll see you then.”
The following day was filled with the usual Wednesday staff meetings, plus a brief office party for one of Susan’s assistants who was leaving. By the time five o’clock rolled around she still hadn’t caught up with the work she’d planned. For a moment she considered skipping the drink with Mike Brentnor, but then decided she had to show up. She was not one to break her promises.
Nathan’s was crowded with the usual five-o’clock faces and she noticed a couple of young administrative assistants looking surprised to see her there. She almost regretted her choice of meeting places, but then she spotted Mike holding down a booth in the far corner. It took her an instant to recognize his face behind the dark moustache and neatly trimmed beard, but the familiar lopsided grin was still there.
“What’s with all the hair?” she asked, giving him a formal handshake in greeting.
“It’s my new, more mature self. How’ve you been, Susan?”
“Fine. I had a nice cruise on the Dawn Neptune awhile back. We opened a Mayfield’s branch on board.”