The Long Dark January: A Nadine Kelso Mystery

by A. S. Andrews

  He turned right in the hallway and saw Andrew and Susan’s bedroom door open a crack at the far end. That feeling of wrong was now overwhelming, coupled with the urge to throw up. Gary cupped a hand over his mouth, pushed the door open, saw his brother and his brother’s wife. Andrew. Susan.

  Gary’s throat made a noise he’d never heard before, muffled by his fingers.

  He stumbled to the other bedroom, woozy, operating on instinct. His nephew’s door was closed. Opening it, he saw a bundle of blankets on the bed, which rose and fell faintly, almost timidly. Gary picked him up, stooping, and lurched out to the hall.

  Gary’s shoulder smacked the glass door as he stumbled out onto the snow. Moving to the concrete, he lay Bobby down and checked for a pulse. The boy was alive.

  The others, though—

  He was too sick to go back in. Poisoned, he realized.

  Gary started for the back gate, fumbled it open. Somewhere along the way he’d dropped the box of donuts, and looking down, saw that he’d splashed a trail of coffee along the route over the snow.

  Deep breaths helped stifle his nausea. His head began to clear. Gary fumbled his cellphone out of his pocket and looked at the house, hoping he was wrong. He was overreacting. Andrew would tease him about it later. He’d never live it down.

  Never live—

  Gary’s thumb hit the keypad, nine, one, one.

  Chapter 2

  You think you know what heartbreak is.

  Castle Rock Chief of Police Jennifer Eng was the first officer to arrive at the Gordon house, parking her patrol car diagonally across the lawn of the neighboring yard. She’d passed the screaming ambulance carrying Bobby Gordon on her way. Holidays and sick leave had depleted her staff, which meant Jen took regular shifts on top of the time she spent in administration. And now she was first on the scene of what sounded like an accidental death. Lucky her.

  Gary Gordon was leaning against the cab of his tow truck, smoking. He hadn’t noticed Jen’s arrival.

  “Morning, Gary,” she said.

  He raised his head to look at her as if the movement was a serious exertion. Gary’s face was unshaven, the mouth and chin shiny with spittle. The flesh around his eyes was swollen and blush colored.

  “They’re gone,” he said. “Both of them. Inside.”

  Jen remembered the duties of an officer first on scene, and coaxed details from Gary. When he’d arrived, what route he’d taken. What he’d touched. The trampled snow leading clockwise around the property supported his story.

  “You switched off the generator, left the back door open? Anything else?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  She didn’t hear the sirens of the fire truck yet. Service could be murderously slow around the holidays. Jen had outfitted each patrol car with emergency gear in preparation for the winter snowstorms. Including a CO meter. With the recent grid maintenance, more homes were relying on generator power. Anything more than 50 parts per millom (PPM) of CO could cause dizziness, nausea, and unconsciousness. An hour or two at 200 PPM could prove fatal.

  She told Gary not to move and circled the house, avoiding his boot prints when possible. Approaching the back door, she donned a white paper mask and turned on the device, held her breath and held the machine just inside the kitchen. After a minute it began beeping aggressively.

  Withdrawing her arm, stepping back, Jen took the reading. 680 PPM.

  Jen let out her breath some distance from the door, and returned to the front lawn. Gary was sitting on the running board. He looked queasy.

  “How long were you inside?” she asked.

  “I dunno. Thirty seconds?”

  “Your brother and his wife are in there?”

  He nodded. “And—and I think they’re—“

  Gary hugged himself, rotating his torso. Jen placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “We’re going to wait for the fire truck,” she said. “It’s too dangerous for us to go back in just now.”

  As she said this she felt the rumble of the fire engine turning onto the narrow street. No siren. She guessed they’d encountered no traffic.

  Jen explained the situation to Max Shoemaker, the senior firefighter. Wordlessly Max donned a full-face oxygen mask and trudged up the path to the house, carrying the industrial fan. Jen watched windows slide open, curtains lift back. The dark rooms were roiling with smoke.

  After three minutes Max walked out the front door, making sure it hung wide. He handed the mask and tank to Danny Ruiz, his partner. Jen could see the answer on his face, but asked anyway, “How bad, Max?”

  “Two, looks like. Husband and wife.” His eyes were swimming. “Both dead.”

  As Chief of the Castle Rock PD, and the lone woman on the staff, Jen Eng couldn’t show her colleagues everything she felt. Which didn’t make those feelings go away. The need to call her son Wei, to hear her husband Lou reassure her that they were both fine, was overwhelming. They lived in a suburb of Chicago, in a home far nicer than the bungalow Jen now occupied alone. Still a family, though separated by work now for almost five months. Jen hadn’t been in a position to give up her job, and truth be told, wasn’t so inclined. For the time being Wei lived with Lou, and Jen visited when she could.

  Not this holiday, though. Not with two staff members sick and another on leave. She was hoping to make it out for New Year’s in February, but wasn’t optimistic. And that was before the deaths of the Gordon family.

  She texted her son a hi. Got a quick hi mum back. That would have to be enough.

  After an hour another reading was taken. They waited some more. Finally the house was deemed safe.

  Jen followed the emergency team inside. Typical one-floor home, with a large living room and dining nook, narrow kitchen, two bedrooms at the back separated by a washroom. The power was off. Living room claustrophobic due to the heavily ornamented tree.

  “We want the master bedroom,” she heard an EMT say.

  They went left. The room was wallpapered in a peach floral pattern. Dark wood dressers on either side of a bed. A man and a woman lay on the mattress, the woman on her side, the man propped up slightly against the headboard. His face and the exposed flesh of his shoulders and torso were flushed a deep red.

  Cherry, Jen thought. In the literature on CO poisoning, the coloration of death is always described as cherry red.

  The woman was tucked over, mostly beneath a red and black quilt. As the EMTs attended to her, Jen recognized the face. She’d seen Susan Gordon at the bank, and sometimes getting coffee from Ingrid’s Café.

  The joys of small town policing—whatever happened, good or bad, usually you knew the people involved.

  The crash trolley took away Susan Gordon. Andrew she didn’t know, which didn’t make the sight of him easier to behold. She tried to read the face—had he known what was happening? The features were slack, suggesting Andrew Gordon had slept through his demise.

  That left the other bedroom. Though empty now, it seemed even more ominous for what had almost happened there. Dispatch had said that Bobby Gordon was breathing steady and likely to survive, which was as much of a blessing as you could ask for.

  Jen steeled herself and glanced inside. Bobby’s window was cracked, the door had been closed, and from what Gary said, Bobby had been sleeping with his head under the blankets. Thank God for that.

  Jen scanned the rooms, taking photos. Judging from the posters, Bobby was into Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, John Cena, and the Mariners. Typical interests for a 9-year-old.

  The firefighters were already saying it was a generator mishap, most likely. It sometimes happened. The power went out, the weather turned bad, and people forgot to ventilate properly. The house had flooded as they slept. One careless mistake—probably the father’s—

  Jen left the room and walked into the narrow hallway that separated the bedrooms from the living room. She stared at the ceiling until Danny asked what she was doing.

  “Smoke alarm,” she said. “It didn�
�t go off.”

  “The power was out, wasn’t it?”

  At the arched entrance to the kitchen, she found it. A smoke alarm and a carbon monoxide detector. Neither light was on.

  “Probably short circuited,” Danny said.

  Jen couldn’t reach the ceiling, so she dragged a chair from the dining table. Climbing up, she unthreaded the alarm from its mount. Dust around the threads. Wires led out from the alarm into a hole in the ceiling.

  She replaced it, then did the same with the carbon monoxide detector. No wires. A battery inside. She dug it out with a fingernail, checked the faint directions on the rounded slot beneath. It had been put in correctly.

  Outside, she asked the fire fighters if any had a battery tester. “Yeah,” Max said. “My tongue.” Already black humor was scabbing over the rawness of what they’d seen.

  Eventually, Max rummaged through a tool box and handed her a slim turquoise machine. Jen placed the battery inside and noted that it drew current. Keeps going and going, she thought.

  It was a conundrum. A faulty detector? Dirty contacts, maybe?

  The hospital in Longview wasn’t far. After taking Susan’s body, the ambulance was already on its way back for Andrew. It pulled up alongside the Jeep in the driveway, lights pulsing across the doors of the garage. The EMTs rolled the trolley back over the snow-covered lawn, into the house, returning with a draped form which they silently transferred to the hold.

  Jen Eng looked away from its small, blanket-covered cargo. The dead always looked smaller in some way. Compressed.

  You think you know what heartbreak is, Jen thought. That’s the moment when the world decides to show you something.

  Chapter 3

  Ingrid Moody pulled the empty tray out of the display case and crumpled the crumb-covered wax paper. She replaced it with a tray of vanilla glazed, the icing on top still melty, just beginning to cool.

  Ingrid’s Café had seen only a handful of customers this morning, making it a typical January weekday. New Year’s resolutions made donuts a less popular commodity—for about a month, usually. Kelly Wells had picked up the standing order for the Traveler’s Lounge, bran muffins and donuts and a tureen of coffee. Andrew’s brother had bought a box of assorted. The poor kid still looked half in the bag. It had been a rough New Year’s, Ingrid thought. A bad portent for the year ahead.

  The only customers in the café at the moment were Peter Quayle and a couple of Canadians who’d pulled off the interstate to gas up, seen her quaint hand-painted sign, and decided to test whether Ingrid’s really served the best darn donuts in Washington State. Even if she couldn’t see their license plate through the windows of the coffee shop, she’d seen enough of the type. In Castle Rock you had regulars and you had passers-through.

  Peter bought himself a refill, slapping a dollar on the counter. The old cop look satisfied about something.

  “Your power back on?” she asked him.

  “Just a good day to be alive,” Peter said. His smile was almost a smirk.

  He began topping up his mug with hazelnut-flavored creamers. Ingrid couldn’t watch him desecrate her coffee that way, and turned back to icing what would be the last batch of her red and green Christmas—sorry, winter holiday—sprinkle specials. She saw Jennifer Eng’s prowler go by out of the corner of her eye, and attached no significance to it. Jen seemed good at her job, but distracted since her family moved away.

  There was always more to do in the mornings than one person could handle, and Ingrid’s part-time help was less than steadfast. It had been different when Susan was younger. She’d learned the recipes by heart and could turn out perfect donuts almost as fast as Ingrid herself. Now her daughter had a family of her own, a husband to look after, and a part-time job at the bank.

  Was it wrong to say Susan looked after Andrew? That was how Ingrid saw it. Andrew would have been a perfect 1950s husband, a little too similar, she thought, to her own husband, dead now for seventeen years. But Walter had warmed and softened in his retirement. So far Andrew hadn’t. Her daughter’s husband had the misfortune to be born three quarters of a century too late.

  That wasn’t entirely fair. Andrew wasn’t a cave man. He had good instincts for business and a surprisingly strong sense of community. He cared for his son as much as any father. But there was something entitled in the way he treated his wife, and that entitlement wasn’t lost on Ingrid Moody.

  She caught Peter staring at her, holding his phone to his ear. “No,” he said, eyes meeting hers, but talking into the phone. “Yeah, she is. I won’t, no. You want me there? Okay. You need me, Chief, I’ll be at the office.”

  “What’s going on?” Ingrid said, not waiting till he’d hung up.

  Peter Quayle’s good humor had slipped beneath a professional cop’s demeanor. “Too early to tell,” he said. “Gary’s over at your daughter’s house. I gather there’s been some sort of accident.”

  “Everyone’s okay?”

  “I haven’t heard otherwise.” He was no longer looking at her.

  “Are you heading over there?”

  “Chief asked me to man the desk at the station.” Peter Quayle said ‘Chief’ with both irony and resignation. He was 57; Jennifer Eng was 42. He’d never said anything to question his superior’s capability or qualifications—the resentment showed in a sarcastic deference, both sycophantic and mocking that, if questioned, could be denied with, “What did I say?”

  Despite that, Ingrid liked Peter Quayle. What he lacked as a cop he made up for as a customer and conversationalist. If it were an emergency, Jennifer Eng would want all hands on deck. Including Peter’s. Wouldn’t she?

  “You’ll tell me if you hear anything?” she said.

  “Of course. I’m sure it’ll all be fine.”

  Peter slipped his coffee into a takeaway cup, smiled at her as he left. A little too kindly, she thought. What the hell is going on?

  The fire truck from Longview passed the coffee shop. She thought it unconnected. But soon after, just to be safe, she tried her son-in-law’s cell. It was still ringing when the ambulance blew by for the second time.

  A sense of something horribly amiss swept over Ingrid, knocking the breath from her. She grabbed the counter until she’d regained control of her lungs.

  Ingrid left the shop, numbed by this feeling of disaster she couldn’t explain. Without locking up, or donning a coat, she began hobbling over the snowy shoulder of the road, towards her daughter’s home.

  It wasn’t real.

  Susan would be sleeping.

  Things like that just didn’t happen here.

  4

  January 6th

  “Castle Rock isn’t that far south, Nadine. An hour, hour and a half. Two tops, but that’s in traffic. It’s an easy commute once you’re on the I-5.”

  Inching her Pilot along the S-curves south of Tacoma, Nadine Kelso thought: easy commute my ass, Teddy.

  This was punishment. There was no other way to interpret it. Rather than a vacation, rather than time to spend with her mother—heaven forbid—here she was, driving south to deal with someone else’s mess.

  And it was a mess. Nadine had been at dozens of crime scenes where evidence had been obliterated due to concern for the victims, or curiosity, or good intentions, or stark naked incompetence. It happened—prints wiped away, blood tracked where it shouldn’t have been. Once she’d even found a shell casing beneath a TV stand, kicked there by a zealous paramedic.

  The deaths in Castle Rock had the look of something else. An accident that, at least to one person, now seemed more likely intentional. Whether that meant murder, suicide, or a faulty hunch, Nadine couldn’t say at this point.

  “Strictly supervisory,” her former boss, Teddy Fowler, had said. “Couple days at most. Lend the locals a well-trained pair of eyes.”

  Teddy was a friend, and his tone had been amicable. But he was also the deputy commissioner, and the subtext of his words was clear to Nadine. Her convalescence was over. While s
he’d never be a cop again, she was still drawing a paycheck as a consultant. Someone had decided it was time to throw her back into the thick of things.

  Unofficially, of course.

  Once she realized the argument was moot, Nadine had read the news coverage of the deaths. There wasn’t much. She had the print-out of the Associated Press story open on the seat next to her, and as traffic came to a halt—again, for heaven’s sake—she reread the article.

  COUPLE DEAD AFTER GENERATOR MISHAP

  Experts Say CO Poisoning ‘Likely,’

  Castle Rock, WA—The bodies of two adults were found dead in their home yesterday, in what authorities suspect is a case of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.

  The bodies have been identified as Andrew Gordon, 34, and his wife Susan Gordon (née Moody), 39.

  Their son, Robert Gordon, 9, was taken to Longview Hospital and treated for CO-inhalation-related injuries. He is expected to make a full recovery.

  The Gordons are survived by Robert; by Andrew’s brother, Gary, 29; and by Ingrid Moody, 68, Susan’s mother.

  “It’s tragic,” Gary Gordon said when contacted the day after the event. “Susan and Andrew were great people. A real nice loving family. The whole town is a little messed up right now.”

  On the morning of January 2nd, Gary Gordon approached the door of his brother’s house. No one responded to his knocking. After several minutes, Gary opened the back door and entered, immediately sensing something was wrong.

  “I could kind of just tell,” he said. “Andrew is a real early riser, and there was no sign of him being up and at ‘em. Then I noticed the generator was going out back. The place was pretty smoked up.”

  After powering down the generator, Gary, a mechanic and former volunteer firefighter, notified authorities.

  “I grabbed Bobby and got out of there real quick,” he said.

  The family had celebrated New Year’s together at Susan’s mother’s house. Mrs. Moody declined to comment on the tragic circumstances of her daughter’s death.