The Long Dark January: A Nadine Kelso Mystery

by A. S. Andrews

  “But at such a high concentration?” Nadine asked.

  She could see Jen puzzling it over. Nadine stepped inside the hallway. A family portrait and certificates on the walls. A Gaugin print from his tropical years, lettering on the bottom reading “AN ELUSIVE PARADISE,” SPECIAL EXHIBITION, FEBRUARY TO MAY, SEATTLE ART GALLERY.

  “You have to hand it to some of them,” she said, more to herself than anyone else.

  “Who?”

  “Murderers. Most are dumb as fence posts. But the odd one—“ Nadine realized she was smiling. “Apologies. I have an appreciation for a good mystery.”

  On the left of the hallway was the door to the garage. Nadine opened it and looked inside. The usual family detritus—a hockey net, a crate of old tax forms, boxes labeled GRANDPA’S and STEMWARE. On the wall near the entrance was the release for the automatic door.

  “How loud was the generator?” Nadine asked.

  “Gary said he heard it from the street.”

  Nadine pressed the button and the door raised up an inch, hesitated a second, and then raised the rest of the way. They could see the Jeep and the patrol car sitting in the drive.

  “Nights are cold,” Nadine said, mostly to herself. “They probably had the generator going to keep the heat on through the night. It’s warm, and they’re used to the sound of the engine. A person could walk in here using the garage door opener, start up another generator, open the door to the hallway so the fumes have somewhere to go, and then walk out. A few hours later they could come back, remove any trace they’d been here.”

  “That’s a pretty wild theory,” Jen said.

  “No argument there. But if something’s possible, it’s worth checking out.”

  She timed the distance from the driveway to the inside of the garage. It could be done in two minutes, given all the givens and assuming no surprises.

  Jen stood beneath the garage door, hands on her hips. The house seemed to disturb her—no, dishearten her was more accurate. She seemed to view the place as the site of a personal failure. It was too early to tell, but Nadine thought it more likely that Jennifer Eng had managed to locate the one piece of evidence left by the person responsible. That wasn’t failure—it was good solid police work. But would it be enough?

  “If the detector was tampered with,” Nadine said, “it stands to reason the person would take great pains to make this appear like an accident. Which we can’t rule out as yet, but seems less likely.”

  “Why do you think that?” the chief asked.

  “Because I test my detectors yearly, too,” Nadine said. “Spring cleaning. My ex and I used to make a day of it.”

  Jen nodded and managed a tight smile.

  “If the Gordons weren’t negligent or suicidal, then they were murdered,” Nadine said. “And by someone who knew them, knew the area, and knew what they were doing.”

  Chapter 7

  They drove back down Main Street to retrieve the generator. Castle Rock at mid-day: not busy, by any stretch, but populated. Active. Stores were open, parking lots surprisingly full. Economy-wise, the town center was geared towards interstate stop-offs. Gas, coffee, and food, in that order. Further north were the businesses which catered to town residents: a grocery store, a used book and record shop with a CLOSED TILL sign above a clock with moveable hands. Nadine couldn’t make out the hour of return.

  They passed Castle Rock Truck-N-Tow. The lights were off and a CLOSED sign was propped in the window.

  “The brother works there?” she asked.

  “Gary,” Chief Eng said. “He’s pretty torn up.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “A lot of folks are.”

  Including Jen herself, Nadine surmised. Policing a small town was different. Much less specialized. There were Seattle cops who’d look down at Jen’s small force as amateurs. Hicks. Let them try working in a place where they knew every victim and perp, and were known by everyone. Where they were accountable to the people they saw every day.

  To Nadine Kelso, death investigation demanded a certain detachment. The cop who cares is the cop who misses things. Sentimentality, respect for the grieving process: those things might make you well-liked. But they didn’t close cases. Which was the reason she was here in the first place.

  They passed Ingrid’s Café. Nadine expected it to be closed, like the mechanic’s. Instead, the neon OPEN sign blazed. She could see several customers in line, a tall, silver-haired woman serving them from behind the counter.

  “Does Susan’s mother have someone to cover for her?”

  Jen glanced over at the shop window. “No, that’s Ingrid,” she said.

  “Not taking time off.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” Jen said. “Sometimes work helps a person deal with grief. The routine of things, the ordinary everyday-ness.”

  Speaking from experience, Nadine guessed. But didn’t press the issue.

  “How’s Bobby doing?” she asked.

  “Good. Still resting in the hospital in Longview. Oxygen therapy and sedatives. He doesn’t have much of a memory of that day, other than coming back from Ingrid’s with his mom in the evening. He’s still pretty shaken up.”

  “Ingrid visits him?”

  “Regularly.”

  “But not today.”

  Jen didn’t answer.

  Nadine followed the chief into the station, past the reception area, into the small communal workspace. Bill Coker was standing by the desk of another officer, a pale man in his late fifties with a beer belly and a fringe of gray-black hair.

  “Peter Quayle,” Jen said to her. “He’s the seniormost officer around here. Peter, this is Nadine Kelso from Seattle, formerly a Lieutenant with the SPD.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Quayle said. “I spent some time working patrol. The Southwest.”

  Nadine nodded. “I started in the Southwest.”

  Quayle grinned and shook his head. “Different job now, I hear.”

  “Fewer chokeholds, but I’d say it’s pretty much the same.”

  Jen interjected before Quayle could retort. “Where’s the generator, Bill?”

  Bill Coker reached under one of the desks and hauled it up. Black with yellow trim, slightly dirty from print dust. The cord wrapped around the handle. “From what I can see, this guy’s working fine.”

  Jen took it from him. “It’s needed for a demonstration. Ms. Kelso would like to run a little experiment.”

  At the house, Bill Coker checked the breakers on the fuse box, then joined Nadine and Chief Eng around back. Peter Quayle had stayed back at the station, “to hold down the fort,” as he’d put it. Coker set the generator up where it had been on the morning that the Gordons were found. Jen nodded and the officer fired it up.

  “Loud,” Nadine half-shouted.

  Jen held her fingers over her ears. They stepped back a little ways.

  “What next?” Jen said.

  “I’ll take a reading from inside.”

  Nadine fitted the rubber strap of the gas mask around her head and took the CO monitor from Jen. She opened the back door and stepped inside.

  There was a well-trodden path through the kitchen, leading down the hallway towards the main bedroom. Nadine went slowly, trying to suss out what kind of people the Gordons were. She paused at a laundry room halfway down the hall, next to a closet full of board games and jackets. A green hair elastic lay on the floor near the washing machine. A hamper full of dirty towels sat on top of the dryer.

  Entering the Gordons’ bedroom, Nadine knocked on the window and waved to the chief. Andrew and Susan’s clothes lay heaped on the floor, kicked aside by paramedics and officers. A fine silver watch sat on the left dresser. Keys and a few coins on the right. The victims’ wallets and phones had already been taken to the station.

  Nadine checked the CO detector, which was still close to zero. She sat on the bed.

  The room was wallpapered and decorated tastefully, and it contained all the proper personal touches
. Wedding portrait, passports in the sock drawer. But there was something discomfiting about the space. The room’s dimensions were small and oblong, and the queen-sized bed with its massive oak headboard made sidestepping and brushing the walls necessary. The closet doors only just opened. Maneuvering around the room while someone else was present would be difficult. Knees would bump, shoulders would pull down photos from the wall. Sexual desires would ebb as the smallness of the room made small the lives lived within it. Nadine’s own marriage to Jimmy Russo would have ended twice as quickly if they’d been confined in a room like this.

  Of course, people made do with much, much less. But rarely by choice. Nadine herself had grown up sharing a room with her brother Frank, and often wondered if their adult enmity had in fact started when they were roommates.

  After twenty-five minutes the CO readings were still negligible. Looking through the window, Nadine made the throat-slashing gesture to cut the power. She joined Jen and Bill Coker as the engine noise was dying.

  “Nothing,” she said. “No different from out here.”

  “What if the window was open?” Jen suggested. “They have it cracked for most of the night, until it gets too cold. Maybe they even noticed the fumes. They start it, go back to sleep, but it’s too late.”

  It seemed unlikely, given the temperature at night and the noise, but Nadine went along with it. Back into the bedroom, the window now open halfway. A white blouse swayed from a coat hanger, strung on the back of the door.

  She closed her eyes and imagined sleeping with the window open and the generator going right outside. It didn’t make sense. After ten minutes, though, the monitor was picking up elevated levels of carbon monoxide.

  Nadine nodded at Jen through the window. The chief nodded back, looking pleased with her deduction. Nadine made a circle motion with her index and middle fingers, keep it going. She walked into the hallway and shut the bedroom door. The reading dropped drastically.

  She entered Bobby’s room. Here the reading was zero PPM, even with the window slightly cracked. It didn’t make sense. How could the parents’ window be the source of the fumes, but Bobby’s window be the reason he was still alive?

  As Nadine walked outside, ripping off her mask, Bill shut off the generator.

  Jen said, “Well?”

  “It would take hours for the fumes to saturate the whole house,” Nadine said. “By the time enough CO reached Bobby’s room, the Gordons would be too dead to shut the window.”

  “What next, then?”

  “Let’s try this another way.”

  Bill and Nadine each took a side of the generator and they walked it inside, placing it in the garage. As the officer replenished the fuel from a jerry can, Nadine opened the garage door and reaffixed her mask.

  When the door was open, Bill started the generator. Grinning, he hit the wall switch, then dashed out before the door could swing down. “Last one out’s a rotten egg.”

  The smell was like rotten eggs, Nadine thought, readjusting her mask. Jen rushed out after her officer, ducking and barely making it beneath the descending door.

  The noise inside was deafening. Nadine stepped through the hallway door and waited. The PPMs began to climb towards 50, the threshold of the safe zone. Then pass it.

  56. Then 70. It had only taken a few minutes.

  Once she had a reading of 80, she moved further into the house, to the master bedroom. In ten minutes the CO levels had risen significantly. The air was hazy, and despite the mask, she could feel the onset of a headache.

  Satisfied, Nadine returned to the garage, shut off the generator, opened the door, and walked down to the sidewalk where Jen and Bill waited. She explained her findings to them.

  “It couldn’t have happened that way,” Jen said. “No way three people could all sleep through that.”

  “It is one heck of a racket,” Bill said. Nadine didn’t blame him for taking the side of his boss.

  She began to say some people could sleep through anything, but realized, looking at the driveway and garage, there might be another possibility.

  Chapter 8

  If any out of towners wondered why Ingrid was wearing sunglasses inside on a January afternoon, well, let them wonder.

  She’d spent the last few days in Longview Hospital, watching Bobby rest, and thanking the nurses for their kindness, though she wished they’d leave her alone.

  The fact was, there was nowhere as comforting for her to be as her café. It was her life, professional and personal, had been since she and her husband opened it, around the time Susan had learned to walk. The corner near the washroom had been made into a play area where her daughter could entertain herself while Ingrid mixed batter and frothed milk for lattes.

  And then later on there was school, a studious Susan at a corner table with a geography textbook in front of her. Angry at the book…Then Susan bringing Bobby to play in the corner while she interviewed for that job at the bank…

  Maybe this had been a bad idea, deciding to open the café today. Maybe all Ingrid had done was to lock herself inside with her ghosts.

  Ingrid felt that grief was something you outran. Eventually it caught you, in the moments like now when the café was empty, her chores done, and there was nothing else to grab hold of her mind. But you could shake yourself free by keeping active, keeping tasks lined up in front of you.

  People from town dropped by the café to offer condolences. The bank sent her a massive bouquet of slightly wilty, out of season flowers. She kept moving. Stick and move, her husband Walter, an amateur boxer, had liked to say.

  Ingrid had turned her phone on silent, unable to deal with yet another sympathy call. She turned it on now to phone Gary. Between them they’d have to coordinate the burial. The autopsies would be finished today or tomorrow, the bodies released. She’d have them sent to Castle Rock Memorial. Then she’d choose urns and decide whether to bury the two of them side by side, or place Susan in the crowded Moody family plot.

  Gary wasn’t picking up. Ingrid was irked but not surprised. In the end, for all men talked about shouldering the heavy loads, they left most of the toughest tasks to women like her. Even Walter, who’d helped open this place only to suffer a heart attack before it could really turn profitable. She’d been left on her own to figure out how to run a small business. It had taken hard work, but she’d done well for herself. Ingrid imagined she could handle the burial, too.

  Death certificates. Probate. The endless paperwork that wounded you a second time. So many officious little people in whose presence you had to stay strong.

  She put the phone down, found herself staring at the play area. Thinking of Bobby, who had gone ballistic seeing the box Grandma kept of Mommy’s baby things. Watching the little boy put together that Susan had once been his age. Trying on one of Susan’s baby shoes, now too small for both of them.

  The boy had been timid in Grandma’s house, growing bolder as the holiday dinner finished, frenetic with his second helping of apple crumble with fresh whipped cream. Delighting in plugging a CO2 container into the spray bottle and spattering each desert plate, whether they wanted whipped cream or not.

  Bobby had grown tired that evening and collapsed on the floor, Susan carrying him to Ingrid’s bed. In the morning he’d asked for crêpes with runny eggs for breakfast. The yolk and syrup on his chin…that smile…his parents’ delight in him…

  Ingrid took a minute, bawling behind the counter.

  She composed herself—as sure as the waves hit, they flowed back—and wiped at her face. No more thoughts along those lines.

  On the floor of the play area was a rubber mat with streets and intersections meant to be inhabited with toys. Bobby had once insisted on taking it home, and Ingrid had let him. A few days later Susan had brought it back. The boy was tired of it, since the roads were too large for his Matchsticks, too small for his Tonka.

  Ingrid rolled the mat up in a sloppy pile and carried it into the back room.

  When s
he came back inside, Kelly Wells was standing at the counter, holding a small poinsettia. The desk manager at the Traveler’s Lounge bowed her head slightly.

  “I was going to leave you a note,” she said. “Then I saw you were open. I’m so, so sorry.”

  Ingrid nodded.

  “From what I hear there’s no suffering that way. So that’s one good thing, I guess.”

  Another nod. The thought of pain hadn’t entered her mind—she’d assumed it had been instantaneous, peaceful—but now she wondered if that was true, and had to shake her head to bring herself back to the young woman at the counter.

  Kelly was trying her best. Her natural disposition was so sunny that she seemed at a loss for words. She tugged out a thread from the frayed cuffed of her jacket, stared at the puddle her men’s boots made on the tile.

  “Anyway,” Kelly said, “I didn’t know if you’d want flowers, but this little guy is doing pretty well, and they say having living plants around is good for the health of people who’ve been through—you know—bad stuff.”

  Like raising the broken ends of the Titanic, Ingrid managed to force the corners of her mouth into an approximation of a smile. “That’s really very kind of you, Kelly. I appreciate the thought.”

  “I’ll understand, of course, if you’d rather not go through with the order tomorrow. I can always get stuff from the gas station.”

  “It’ll be ready for you,” Ingrid said. “Anything for this afternoon?”

  “A nonfat mocha, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  After the girl left, Ingrid thought of where to put the plant. Decided it could brighten up one of the tables. She moistened the soil with tap water. It wasn’t much of a plant, probably a leftover from Christmas, but the thought was nice.

  For an hour Ingrid was sporadically busy with out of town traffic. She ran through her last carton of soy milk, added it to the order for tomorrow. Cleaned and washed dishes in the meantime. Near closing time, she served her last drink, a triple-shot latte contaminated with peppermint syrup, topped with whipped cream (don’t think of your grandson, not just now) and chocolate flecks.