She stops laughing. “Oh.” She runs her tongue along the front of her teeth, puckering her forehead. She’s thinking. I let her.
“Who is it?” she asks.
“Victoria Harkness,” I say.
“Oh,” she says again, and shakes her head. “Oh. Poor little Vicky. I remember her.” There’s a pause while she looks back into the past.
“Her body was recently pulled from the river.”
She snaps to attention. “I heard something about that. That was Vicky? Oh, dear. How tragic.” Her face pales, and she looks her age, which is probably late fifties.
“Were you her teacher?”
“English. Back in the day. Way before all this.” She waves a hand, indicating her surroundings. “I was still hoping to discover an incipient Virginia Woolf. Or Graham Greene.” She rolls her eyes at her own naïveté. “No such luck. But there were occasional sparks in the darkness.”
I ask her about teaching, the rewards, funny stories, anything to get her comfortable with reminiscing. Plus, it’s interesting. I admire her long-ago dedication to the art and craft of reading and writing, her ingenious plots to interest her students who really just cared about TV and sports and their own budding hormones. Finally, I wonder in a conversational tone, “Why did you call her ‘poor little Vicky’?”
I learn that young Victoria was one of those sparks in the dark. That even back then she had a shine. When the class had to write and give speeches, she was the only one who enjoyed the assignment and treated it seriously.
“I still remember her speech,” says Rhonda. “It was on the meaning of life.”
“Pretty esoteric for a thirteen-year-old,” I say.
“Yes, well. She wasn’t ordinary.” The principal’s smile is melancholic. “It’s so sad to hear this.”
“And then she moved away.”
“Not quite then. It was afterwards.” Smile goes away.
“Afterwards?” I hate it when people parrot other people, so I say, “After what?”
Rhonda pauses, a small frown on her face. The clouds outside part and a ray of sunshine illuminates the Easter cactus and its tiny pink buds. I wonder if she’s going to answer, or if she’s going to go all private with ‘I’ve already said too much.’ Instead, she says, “If I’d had more experience I would’ve noticed the signs. Recognized the problem. Helped her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She just shut down. Became incommunicative. Stopped doing her homework. I thought she was just being a rebellious brat, like thirteen-year-olds will.” She shakes her head. “I wish I’d been more on top of it. But we know so much more now than we did then. And I was still seeing my students as children with all their little quirks, not as potential victims.”
Her meaning is still fluttering just out of reach. “When you say victim, you mean…”
She sighs and steeples her fingers against her mouth. “I’m sorry, I can’t say with any certainty, so you’ll have to draw your own conclusions. Let’s say, with twenty years of hindsight, that I think there was some trauma in her life.”
I take a moment to digest her words. “So what happened? Do you know?”
“No. I don’t. All I know is that for the last couple of months of seventh grade she turned into an automaton, and then the family moved away. Or at least, Vicky and her mother did. Telling, in retrospect.” She looks out the window. “I should have seen it. Should have realized.” Another pause. “It haunts me.”
A silence grows between us. I don’t know what else to ask her. So I stand up.
“Thank you for your time, Ms. Collins.”
She walks me to the door without further conversation. I’ve only gotten a crumb, but maybe if I go deeper into the woods I’ll find another.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SOMEONE ELSE KNOWS about Victoria’s past: her mother. I call her up. Ask if I can meet her back at Victoria’s apartment. She agrees with great reluctance. I’m not thrilled with it myself, but once again I climb the stairs and enter the dead woman’s home. Elizabeth Harkness is going through papers, as evidenced by the stacks on the dining table. Like my first visit, the blinds are closed, and the room is dim.
This time, she doesn’t offer me a beverage.
“All this,” she gestures at the papers. “It’s all that’s left of my daughter.”
I don’t know what to say to that. So instead, I repeat my request to talk about Victoria.
“Please, Detective. Have some respect for my privacy. You can’t imagine what I’m going through.”
“Maybe I can’t, but there’s someone else who can. Claire Chandler. Her husband — the bookkeeper at your daughter’s church — has just been murdered. Last night.”
“How tragic.” But her voice is flat, and I’m not getting any sympathy vibes. It makes me angry, her assumption of self-pity that eclipses any one else’s pain.
I say roughly, “Yes. It is. And this is why I need to talk about Victoria, before anyone else is killed. Before it becomes a three-act tragedy.”
Maybe it’s the cultural reference, but she thaws a little. She says she’s told me everything, reiterates she doesn’t know anything about her daughter’s recent life.
“That’s okay. I actually want to talk about her childhood.”
“Oh?”
Is it my imagination, or is that syllable freighted with a lifetime’s worth of denial and regret? I say, “Tell me about your family and living situation when you lived here in Astoria.”
Ms. Harkness gives me a brief sketch, some of which I’ve heard before. Her husband was a city planner. The schools were of poor quality. The society lacked culture. Their neighbors were no doubt decent people, but working class. Her husband had an engineering degree but the rest of the family hadn’t done much to rise above their background. The Harknesses were a local family that lived outside of town, in the rural backwoods of Clatsop County. Her husband’s brother would often invite himself to stay with them for a day or two, sponging on their hospitality while doing errands or business in town.
Oh, my God. Somebody slap this woman.
I kind of agree with Zoe. But. The thing I want to talk about is difficult. There’s no gentle way to broach the topic of abuse, so I don’t even try. I tell her what I heard from Principal Collins, about Victoria’s change in behavior and the suggestion of trauma. Ask her mother if she can tell me what happened.
Her tone changes. There’s anger, the murderous kind. She says, “it was happening under my nose, and I didn’t realize. When I did, I was horrified. And so, so angry. I confronted my husband, told him he had to face up to his brother and make it stop. That we would prosecute. But that — that coward did nothing. He said his brother would never do anything like that. That I was imagining things. But I knew I wasn’t. Victoria went from being a lovely, angelic girl to almost catatonic overnight. She wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t leave the house. I knew something was wrong.”
“What did you do?”
“I took my daughter and I left. I went back to Portland where my people were. I did everything in my power to counteract the — the poison that evil man had inflicted on my daughter. I enrolled Victoria in a private Christian school where I knew she would be protected physically and morally.”
Sounds like she served her daughter right to the wolves. Why not just put an apple in her mouth?
Ms. Harkness pulls a handkerchief from her purse and presses it to her face. Then she fumbles for a compact and, looking in the tiny mirror, blots the smudged makeup. Repairing her image.
I try to pull the narrative together. One thing seems clear, but I have to confirm. “Ms. Harkness, I know this is painful, but I have to be sure. Are you saying that your brother-in-law abused your daughter?”
She nods without meeting my eyes, placing the compact down on the table.
Daniel Chandler said Victoria was looking for a way to process emotional trauma through art in order to help her congregants. It sounds as though she was also look
ing for a way to help herself.
“Where is your brother-in-law now?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. I severed all ties with that family. I only kept my husband’s name for Victoria’s sake.”
“But he could still be here?”
She closes her eyes and nods. “That’s why I didn’t want her to come back. Why I don’t want to be here. It makes my skin crawl.” Her voice is brittle with anguish and outrage. “What if he tried to contact her again?”
What if? “Did you mention this to the police?”
She bites her lip. “No. It’s too disgusting. And long ago. What bearing could it have?”
I’m trying to get her to cooperate, so I refrain from giving her a lecture about withholding information. She doesn’t strike me as someone who shares herself lightly. I need to get everything I can in case she clams up later. So I ask if she’s heard anything more from the police.
She says they’ve told her there’s no phone activity beyond the Wednesday before last, no financial movement since the Saturday previous to that. Ms. Harkness gets up from the table and goes to a window. She yanks on the blind cords, pulling it up with a metallic rattle. Sunlight streams into the room, and I glimpse a snapshot of the river and industrial buildings.
“The police tell me my daughter’s death was a tragic accident.”
“Oh?” I’m surprised. “Are they dropping the investigation?”
“Yes. Apparently they found the fingerprints of a maintenance worker on her purse and wallet. He claimed he was only checking the apartment, that the door was unlocked, and he never saw Victoria. The police seem to believe him. But his kind always lie. The man should be sent back where he came from. The detectives here are incompetent.”
With an effort, I keep a cool countenance. “Did they have any other suspects?”
“They had one other ‘person of interest,’ as they called him. But they interviewed him and he had an alibi. They say there’s no indication of foul play. She drowned after falling into the river, and there’s an end to it.”
The desolation in her voice is achingly real. And I feel for her, I do. Despite my annoyance at her self-imposed bubble of social superiority. I guess nothing can shield us from love and the associated pain. It’s too bad I have to cause more of it, but in the end I get her to divulge the uncle’s name: Abe Harkness.
After the interview with Elizabeth Harkness, I go for a drive. I spiral up the on-ramp to the Megler Bridge, past the backside of the houses on Alameda, until I’m on the road deck, two hundred feet above the water. Freighters and cruise ships and battleships can all pass safely beneath, even at high tide. I press my lips together as a gust of wind broadsides my car and makes me swerve away from the centerline.
Once I pass over the main shipping channel, the bridge drops to a more prosaic height. Cormorants and seagulls soar over the guardrails. To my left are swatches of brown; extensive sand bars sprawl just beneath the surface. During low tide, they become visible as monochrome islands outlined with foam.
When a detective interviews someone, she has to keep her feelings in check. It’s important not to react, to record the facts and not add her own emotional baggage to the atmosphere. But after hearing about something like this, it’s hard not to feel angry.
Victoria had been an abused child. First by her uncle, then by her well-meaning mother. Enrolling her in a private school fell far short of what was needed. Victoria should have had therapy. I mean, hello, doesn’t Elizabeth read the news? A religious school and church are, sadly, no protection against further abuse, and it feels criminally ignorant that her mother just assumed they would be. The girl had been groomed and molested by an older man at an especially vulnerable age. She wouldn’t have been able to protect herself, might even have unintentionally responded to attention in a provocative manner. And the overt morality of a religious school may have made her feel even more isolated and unworthy. I truly hope nothing further happened to Victoria, I hope the new surroundings were safe. But. It’s perhaps not surprising that she rejected all forms of traditional worship.
It’s incredible that Victoria was trying to turn her own tragedy into a positive. I admire her for it. But. What if her abuser heard about her church, and went to a service? Or she might have looked him up herself. Trying for closure, or maybe an apology. Knowing what I know about her, it sounds like something she might do.
Whoever reached out first, what if their meeting didn’t result in hope or healing, but in harm?
The man in my vision had said he wanted to stop Victoria from spreading lies. Could that be a reference to her talking about the abuse? He might not want to admit he was a pedophile, to himself or anyone else. It might be buried so deep in his psyche that he truly believed it was a lie.
No one ever wants to see themselves as they truly are.
As the highway unfurls through mossy forest and over gleaming waterways, with their attendant herons and raptors, I turn the pieces of the investigation, trying to arrange an image. My latest idea has a resonance to it; I can’t help but feel the past has a bearing on Victoria’s death. If the police stopped their digging when Seth Takahashi had an alibi, if there’s no forensic evidence to support an investigation, then the only one pursuing this is me.
I get it. Drownings are tough. It’s hard to prove a homicide, especially when it’s in a big body of moving water. Forensic evidence gets washed away. Plus, it’s the third most common method of suicide among women. The Astoria Police Department doesn’t have my dubious advantage of psychotic visions to help them.
Or maybe they just need to focus on the latest crime: the killing of Daniel Chandler.
I haven’t allowed myself to think about this crime. Because it’s the mother of all monkey wrenches. I don’t understand what it means. Plus, Daniel was my client. Oh, Claire approached me, but Daniel signed the contract. Legally, I’m not sure where I stand. Do I continue with the Harkness investigation, ignoring Chandler’s death? Do I broaden the scope to include Chandler? Or do I back off completely? I didn’t really like him, but murder is murder.
My questions to myself are largely rhetorical — of course I’m going to continue. Of course I’m going to try to find out what happened to Chandler too. Because I just don’t think two murders in the same small group of people are a coincidence. There’s a unified theory that explains them both.
Corpses always show up when you’re around. You seem to inspire people to murder. A regular Typhoid Mary.
I’m getting pretty sick of Zoe. Ignoring her doesn’t seem to be working. She isn’t going away, and I don’t know how to get rid of her. She understands me better than anyone. She was present when I had my meltdown. And for that reason, it frightens me to hear her now.
On my way home, I pass the Three Bean Coffee Shop and screech across two lanes of traffic to wedge my car in between a Suburban and Silverado before sauntering inside to snag a tiny table by the window.
Could Uncle Abe Harkness be responsible for Chandler’s death too?
The only way to find out is to discover where Victoria’s uncle has been for the past few years.
Soon, I’ve got a toasted ham sandwich — a panino, in cafe parlance — and a cup of black coffee with a pinch of salt keeping me company as I rev up the search engine on my laptop, search for Abe+Harkness+Astoria+Oregon. I add the state after getting a bunch of false positives for people in New York. All kinds of results cascade down the screen: social media profiles, white pages, newspaper mentions. And something I don’t expect: an obituary. After reading it, and associated Astorian articles published around the same time, I discover that Abe Harkness died in a car accident five years ago in which he was found to have a blood alcohol level of .23. Long before Victoria returned to the town she’d grown up in.
I’m disappointed. In some corner of my brain, I’d been hoping that somehow the abusive uncle would be implicated in the homicide. But if Victoria was writing a book about recovery, where she actually ta
lked about her trauma, and if she named names, or even if someone only thought she had, that could be a strong motive for murder. He might even have approached her about it, and she would have gone to him in the hope of redemption. Now that idea had been quashed.
Another dead end.
But. Old sins cast long shadows, as they say. Maybe there are other members of the family who don’t want the secret to come out.
So I call Elizabeth Harkness from the parking lot, pulling my hood up against the rain. I know she won’t be too eager to talk about the past again, so I soften her up by asking about Victoria’s book. She doesn’t know anything about it. I ask about Victoria’s laptop. She hadn’t been able to break the password. I ask about other Harknesses in the area and there’s a predictable silence. Then:
“If any of those people are still around they’d better keep out of my way.”
“Listen, Ms. Harkness, is there any chance that one of them might bear some sort of grudge against Victoria?”
Another pregnant pause. When she answers, her words are laced with bitterness and gall. “What do any of them have to be angry about? We’re the ones whose lives they ruined. If anyone has the right to a grudge, it’s me.”
And of course from her point of view, she’s right.
But. I still get her to tell me some names.
For all the good they do me. At the end of the day, I’ve still got nothing.
Maybe the thought of being a woman, unprotected and alone, has dug into my subconcious. Because that night I dream I’m Zoe. I’m back in the squat, lying on the floor next to Blue and Kirstin. He’s a runner for the Black Dogs. She’s a girl from the cathouse on third. They’re both passed out. I hear voices. I get up and go into the hallway. The world seems to tilt, and I hold on to the wall. The voices come closer. They don’t see me. Men in suits. Men in DPD uniforms, walking and talking with Sonny and his lieutenants. I see money change hands. They walk right through me as though I don’t exist. The men go back to where Blue and Kirstin are sleeping, and then I hear the screams.
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