by J. A. Jance
Once Anders was back home, his somewhat disappointed but very well-heeled father helped set Anders up in a family-owned auto dealership. A short time later he had married Janice in a quirky wedding that should have amounted to a happy ending but didn’t—at least not for Janice. According to the way her sister, Estelle, told the story, Janice had gotten pregnant out of wedlock while Anders was still on the rebound after the breakup of a long-term relationship with his high school sweetheart.
As the story unfolded, it seemed to me that, at the time of their shotgun wedding, both Janice and Anders had had plenty of growing up to do. Anders still liked to party. He drank too much and played poker too much. As for Anders’s parents? They tolerated their new daughter-in-law, but they felt their son had married beneath his station in life, and they made it clear that they were none too happy with the match. When that first unplanned pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, the elder Harrisons probably thought the marriage would end as well. Much to their surprise, however, it didn’t, and soon Janice turned up pregnant yet again, this time with Tiffany Anne.
After losing the first baby, Janice had been overjoyed to welcome Tiffany into the world. Although she had adored her new role as mother, there had been some dark clouds on the marital horizon. In private Janice had complained about her in-laws’ constant harping and disapproval and about Anders, who continued to drink and party and generally behave like an arrogant jerk.
“I told her that if worse came to worst, she could always bring the baby and come home,” Estelle said. “The folks and I had moved to Mukilteo by then, and I was still in high school. It would have been crowded living in a little two-bedroom apartment, but if we’d had to, we would have made it work. But then Tiffany died.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“She died of SIDS,” Estelle answered. “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.”
“At the time of the baby’s death, do you believe Janice was actively thinking about leaving her husband?” I asked.
“I’m not sure how serious she was, but I do know that she had mentioned it to me more than once, after Tiffany was born and before she died.”
“And afterward?”
“I can’t tell you about that,” Estelle answered sadly, “at least not for sure. Janice sort of shut everyone else out after that, me included. I’ve always felt I wasn’t there for her when I should have been.”
So that was the other part of Estelle Manring’s deal. She blamed Anders for her sister’s death, but she also blamed herself.
“She was depressed then?” I asked.
“I suppose.”
“Were there any other reasons for Janice to want out of the marriage in addition to concerns about her husband’s drinking and partying?” I asked.
“You mean, did he hit her?” Estelle asked. We had been speaking by phone, and there was a long pause before she resumed speaking. “Janice never came out and said as much, but I always wondered about that. He was a control freak and expected her to do as he said. Sort of one of those ‘my way or the highway’ kind of guys.”
“Tell me about the baby,” I said.
“Tiffany was three months old when she died,” Estelle answered. “Janice put her down for a nap one afternoon. When she came back an hour or so later, Tiffany was cold to the touch. Janice called 911 immediately, but it was already too late. She was beside herself with grief—blamed herself for being a terrible mom, for not going in to check on the baby sooner, for everything. And then, two months after that, Janice was gone, too, with everybody claiming that she took her own life by jumping off that bridge.”
“But you hold Anders responsible, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” Estelle declared. “He was Janice’s husband. Isn’t it always the husband?”
Not always, of course, but I could see Estelle’s point. She had also spent the last thirty or so years mired in the unshakable belief that her former brother-in-law had somehow played a part in her sister’s death.
“So where was Anders on the night in question?” I asked.
“It turns out he had an air-tight alibi,” Estelle answered. “He had a regularly scheduled Friday night poker game that night with two of his best buds from high school, one of whom turned out to be an Island County deputy sheriff. There were usually four of them, but the other guy couldn’t make it. According to Anders, after the game broke up, he went back to the house a little after midnight and discovered Janice wasn’t there. According to him, she had been moody lately and threatening to go visit us. Assuming that’s what she’d done, he went to bed and was sound asleep when the cops showed up a while later to say they’d found her car on the bridge.”
That was the gist of my hour-long phone call with Estelle Manring that Thursday morning. Her sister, Janice, was dead; the world thought she had committed suicide; and Estelle thought her former brother-in-law responsible. But here’s the deal, I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy. In talking to witnesses, I prefer working eyeball-to-eyeball, so I made an appointment to meet up with Estelle at her real estate office in Poulsbo the following afternoon in order to continue our conversation.
Bellingham is a small city with a population of right around 85,000. Running a cop shop anywhere means living in a pressure cooker on a daily basis. Since Mel—the girl of my dreams—is currently the one inhabiting said pressure cooker, I try to get her out of Dodge for a day or so on the weekends by making sure we spend at least one night a week at our condo in Seattle’s Denny Regrade area. Yes, there’s an eighty-mile drive coming and going, but there are times when even fighting your way through gnarly traffic can be a useful form of decompression.
I figured I’d hop over to the Kitsap Peninsula in the early afternoon on Friday, spend some time interviewing Estelle, and then take the Bainbridge ferry to Seattle in time to have dinner with Mel. And because I could tell from the weather report that the seas might be rough that day, I took the added precaution of bringing along the seasickness prevention bracelets that had been a gift from my grandmother, thank you very much. I didn’t end up having to use them, but knowing they were right there in my pocket and readily available should the need arise gave me a lot of reassurance.
Bainbridge Realty and Trust has its offices just off the highway in Poulsbo, but from the waterfront photos prominently displayed on their walls, most of their business dealings were on Bainbridge Island rather than on the mainland. When I arrived, I was told that Estelle Manring was involved in an unscheduled but complex meeting of some kind, so I spent some time cooling my heels in the reception area, reading through the company’s obligatory and laudatory literature, which let me know that as far as sales were concerned, Estelle Manring was one of their top brokers.
The brochure not only contained a listing of the company’s current hot real estate offerings, it also included Glamour Shots–style photos of their several brokers. The one above Estelle Manring’s name showed a reasonably good-looking and well-dressed businesswoman somewhere in her forties. However, no amount of deft photoshopping had been able to correct two very visible flaws in Estelle’s appearance. The fixed smile she showed to the camera didn’t reach all the way to her eyes, and there was no concealing the permanently downturned cast of her lips at both edges of that forced smile. I’ve seen features like that all too often, etched into the faces of the grieving after some sudden and impossibly tragic event has stolen away someone near and dear. Janice Harrison may have been gone for more than thirty years, but the pain of that loss was still writ large on her sister’s somber face.
When Estelle finally emerged from the meeting, she greeted me with an apologetic shake of her head. “Sorry,” she muttered. “The more someone pays for a house, the more unreasonable they become.”
“Your basic well-heeled toddlers?” I asked.
This time Estelle’s smile was genuine. “Yes,” she said. “I need to remember that line the next time I get cornered by someone who decides that the Sub-Zero in her otherwise ‘perfect’ house i
sn’t the ‘right’ Sub-Zero.”
She led me into a conference room where the only item visible on the otherwise empty surface of the table was a high school yearbook—the 1981 issue of Oak Harbor High’s Acorn. Once we were seated and she passed the book in my direction, I noticed it was already open to the page depicting that year’s big-hair version of homecoming royalty—none other than Anders Harrison and Betsy Davis.
“That’s my former brother-in-law with his first love and second wife,” Estelle told me. “Janice was just a brief side trip—a detour as it were—along the way. Betsy Davis Parmenter was someone who believed in playing the field. She broke up with Anders right after their senior prom, and the split left him in a world of hurt. Betsy immediately married guy number two, Ron Parmenter, only circling back to Anders once she tired of husband number one. Or once he tired of her. I was never sure which was which.”
“Were Anders and Betsy still an item while he was married to Janice?” I asked.
“Not as far as I could tell,” Estelle answered. “Betsy claimed that after their senior year, she didn’t see Anders again until long after Janice’s death.”
“Does that mean you asked her about that directly?”
Janice bit her lip. “Nobody else was asking any questions,” she said. “Someone had to do it.”
Estelle might not have uncovered evidence to the effect that Anders and Betsy had been fooling around behind Janice’s back, but it clearly wasn’t for lack of trying.
I changed the subject by once more focusing on the yearbook. “Is Janice in here, too?” I asked.
Nodding, Estelle took the book, thumbed through a few pages, and handed it back. “She was a junior when Betsy and Anders were seniors,” Estelle explained, turning the book back in my direction with a different page showing—one containing pictures of members of that year’s junior class. The photo featuring Janice Marshall showed her to be a serious-looking young woman who had resisted the big-hair look—her long, dark locks pulled back in a simple ponytail. The thick-rimmed glasses she wore gave her a studious look. The contrast between the two young women couldn’t have been greater. Betsy, dolled up in her homecoming finery, looked like a beauty pageant contestant while Janice was your basic plain Jane.
There were paperclips attached to some of the yearbook’s pages. Sorting through those, I found a photo that featured the co-captains of the football team—Gus Loper and Anders Harrison. “Wait,” I said, “wasn’t that the name of the deputy sheriff who was playing poker with Anders the night Janice disappeared?”
Estelle nodded. “You’ve got it. Gus was a deputy back then. Now he’s the local sheriff.”
“Are the sheriff and Anders still tight?” I asked.
Estelle nodded. “As far as I know, they are,” she said bitterly. “Anders and Gus are in Rotary together. Gus runs the sheriff’s department, Anders is on the school board, and Betts is the mover and shaker behind the garden club. You could say they’re all just one big happy family.”
It wasn’t hard to see how Estelle had arrived at the conclusion that the close friendship between the two men might have impacted that original investigation, and I found myself asking some of those same questions. Had the poker game been nothing more than a manufactured story aimed at providing a bulletproof alibi for a friend badly in need of one? Or was it possible that the deputy’s involvement in the case had helped contribute to the ready acceptance of the premise that Janice’s disappearance could be attributed to suicide rather than something more sinister? If that were the case, I wondered, wouldn’t there have had to be some signs of a cover-up? As President Nixon learned to his everlasting regret, doing the crime is one thing. It’s the cover-up that gets you every time.
I spent the better part of an hour with Estelle that afternoon. Like so many cold case family members, she was grateful that, at long last, someone was willing to hear her out. Estelle maintained that Janice was someone who, no matter how upset she might have been over the loss of her child, would never have taken her own life. And she also hinted that at that juncture in Anders’s career, losing his wife in what was commonly regarded as a horrible tragedy had been far more socially acceptable around town than a rancorous divorce would have been.
When it came time for me to leave and head for the ferry, I asked if it would be possible for me to borrow the yearbook.
“Sure,” Estelle said. “Keep it as long as you like.”
Even though it was Friday afternoon, it was a winter Friday afternoon, and I made it onto the Bainbridge ferry on the first try. Then, rather than go upstairs, I stayed on the car deck, turned on the reading light, and paged through the book. I was struck by how young all those kids looked—young, hopeful, and incredibly innocent. I found a few more photos of Janice Marshall scattered throughout the book. She was on the yearbook staff. She was also a member of the National Honor Society and the Future Teachers of America.
Becoming a teacher had never happened because Janice never actually graduated. Ed Marshall, Estelle and Janice’s father, was injured and permanently disabled in a logging truck accident the summer before Janice’s senior year. She and Anders had started dating late in the summer, just before he went off to the U-Dub. When she turned up pregnant later that fall, the couple had married over Christmas vacation. Janice had dropped out of Oak Harbor High School about the same time Anders had dropped out of the University of Washington. She had suffered a miscarriage only a month or two later. By 1985, at barely twenty-one years of age, Janice Harrison had already lost two children and was stuck in what was reportedly a challenging marriage. Those circumstances made the idea of her committing suicide seem a lot more plausible.
As for the yearbook photos of Betsy Davis? Her pictures were everywhere. She seemed to be Oak Harbor High’s version of the “It” girl. Like Janice, Betsy, too, was in the National Honor Society. In addition, she was a member of the varsity tennis team and a cheerleader, along with serving as student body treasurer. Sometime before their springtime breakup, she and Anders had been photographed together after being voted most likely to succeed.
As the ferry slowed at the Coleman ferry dock, I closed the book thinking sadly about those very young kids. I thought about how, in the four short years between 1981 and 1985, so many of those hopeful innocents would find their lives indelibly touched by tragedy. And I thought, too, about Janice Marie Marshall Harrison—long gone now but thankfully not forgotten.
Mel and I went to dinner that night at our favorite walking-distance hangout—El Gaucho on First Avenue. Over our split steak, I told her about everything I had learned about Janice Marshall Harrison’s long-ago disappearance and presumed death. Mel heard me out without comment.
“It sounds like a familiar story,” she said when I finished. “The popular in-girl drops the guy, your local big man on campus, who immediately seeks out a second-choice girl and knocks her up. A year or two later, Janice is dead while everybody else apparently lives happily ever after. No wonder Estelle’s upset. So what’s the next step?”
Obviously Mel had come down solidly in Janice’s and Estelle’s corner and fully expected that a next step on my part would soon be forthcoming.
“First thing next week, I guess I’ll make a pilgrimage over to Whidbey and pay a call on the Island County sheriff.”
And that’s exactly what I did bright and early the following Monday morning. On my way back to Bellingham after our weekend in the city, I swung off I-5, drove across Camano Island, and motored over to Whidbey via Deception Pass. On my way to Coupeville, I stopped off at the overlook where Janice’s car had been found abandoned. These days there are plenty of WDOT surveillance cameras in the area. Back in the eighties, however, that wasn’t the case. I turned up at the sheriff’s office in Coupeville at around eleven that morning and handed Sheriff Loper’s receptionist one of my TLC business cards.
“May I tell him what this is about?” she asked.
“Janice Harrison,” I answered, “Janice Mars
hall Harrison.”
When the woman ushered me into the sheriff’s private office a few minutes later, two things were immediately clear. For one, Sheriff Gus Loper’s big-hair days from back in the mid-eighties were long gone. He wasn’t exactly bald as a billiard ball, because he did have a close-cropped fringe running earlobe to earlobe around the back of his head. As for number two? He wasn’t the least bit happy to see me.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, sending the business card his receptionist had just handed him spinning back across his desk with enough force that it spiraled off onto the floor. “Estelle Manring’s back at it again, right? So who the hell are you and what the hell is a TLC?”
I stooped down, retrieved the card, and put it back on his desk. “My name’s J. P. Beaumont,” I told him, “formerly with the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team. I’m currently associated with The Last Chance, aka TLC. It’s a consortium of retired homicide and forensic folks who volunteer our services to resolve long-unsolved homicides.”
“You’re out of luck then,” Sheriff Loper declared. “Janice Marshall’s death is not unresolved; she committed suicide.”
No matter how many decades pass and no matter how many feminists would like it to be otherwise, women who hail from small-town America are forever stuck in a time warp and referred to by their birth names—their “maiden names” as it were. Thirty plus years later, this was still the case with Janice.
“Look,” Sheriff Loper continued, “Estelle Manring lost her sister. I get that. But Anders lost big, too—his wife and both of his babies. Everybody acts like it was all so much water off a duck’s back as far as he was concerned, but it wasn’t like that. He was devastated. Went off the deep end for a while—drinking, drugging, you name it. It was the better part of two years before he started getting his act back together. If it hadn’t been for Betts turning up and taking him in hand, he probably would have ended up dead, too.”