Family Skeleton Rainy City Mystery #2)

Chapter One

The last decade of the Twentieth Century was less than half over when we had one of the wettest springs on record in Western Washington. That’s saying something when you live between the Japanese Current and the peaks of the Cascade Mountains. It hadn’t been all that long since the Berlin Wall was torn down, which I remember because a friend of mine who had been there brought me a chunk of concrete from the Wall to use as a paperweight.

It was late April. I had an appointment in the state capitol that afternoon, a family with a missing daughter. My VW hydroplaned most of the way down the interstate from Seattle, banging in and out of the unrepaired ruts and shoved around by the wheel-spray of speeding eighteen-wheelers that had dug those ruts.

West of Olympia, off Highway 8, my scribbled directions led to a rural neighborhood. The homes stood on small plots of acreage cross-fenced for horses. The few horses visible stood hip-shot, as if they suspected spring had been cancelled. I followed a bright new school bus, shiny in the rain, as it distributed a dozen or so grade-school kids in slickers or ski jackets. They trudged up different driveways like penitents on the way to confession. A whole winter of rain can dampen the spirits of even Western Washington kids.

The house I was looking for turned out to be a sprawling old rambler on the shore of Oyster Bay. Mature Douglas firs were spaced across the property. I parked under one. A woman opened the front door before I reached it. She was tall and big-boned, and it took a moment to notice she carried a lot more on her hips than was fashionable. Her pale face had good bones, but its relative gauntness didn’t go with the hips; it didn’t take a trained detective to suspect some kind of diet in progress. Her light hair appeared to be fading rather than turning grey. There were laugh lines around her wide mouth, but she wasn’t laughing now. She wore jeans and a man’s green silk shirt. No makeup, no jewelry.

Mr. Hummel? I’m Mildred Filmore.

She offered a firm handshake and led me through a spacious foyer into a big living room with wide picture windows on the bay. Across the rain-speckled water, lights of other homes twinkled cozily through near-solid evergreens.

A great view, I said.

Yes. In the clear weather, you can just see Mount Rainier off in the distance. We bought this place when Ron passed his probation with the state. Of course we could never afford a place out here now.

It was a canned speech she must have given a hundred times, without thought or effort. She got me settled with coffee and took hers to an upright recliner across the room.

I hope you will excuse me, she said formally. I just feel awkward about this whole thing. She paused. I don’t really know what to say to you. Somehow it feels disloyal to Jennifer to talk about her to strangers. I’m sorry. I hope I haven’t offended you.

I revised my opinion on her appearance from diet-in-progress to stress. It’s not that easy to get me to take offense. I am a stranger, and in the same circumstances, I wouldn’t know what to say to me, either.

Do you have children, Mr. Hummel?

An old pain came and went. It was a predictable question. And none of her business. I didn’t like to discuss my personal affairs with strangers, either.

I’m not married, I said.

Oh, she said. I’m sorry.

So am I, sometimes. On the other hand, sometimes I’m not sorry at all.

I guess it’s the same for married people, except in reverse. Then she put her hand to her mouth as if she had made a damning admission.

I smiled past her discomfort. "My Georgia grandmother was always quoting a piece of a poem: She’s sure she missed some paradise, because she had to stick and grind – while he, on aching feet, is sure he left it somewhere far behind."

She really looked at me then, for the first time. I’ve never heard that. I guess I thought private investigators who quote poetry were something on TV. Do you know what those lines are from?

I shook my head. My grandmother had what you might call eclectic tastes in poetry. I was raised on stuff like that. I never thought to ask her.

Eclectic, she repeated. Did my husband tell you I’m a librarian?

No, ma’am. I sipped some of my coffee.

You must have had an interesting childhood, growing up with a grandmother like that.

You could even say lucky, and I wouldn’t disagree. The thing is, we’re not here to interview me. We’re here to interview you.

She didn’t smile. I guess I’ve always been good at putting off unpleasant things. This is so – well, melodramatic.

But you share your husband’s concern about your daughter’s whereabouts?

"Share?" She didn’t like the taste of the word. I’ve been nagging him for days to do something! It’s just like him to put something off and off, and then take the drastic step.

Have either of you been up to Auburn to check on her?

I was afraid to, she said simply. "She’s so damned – independent. Acted as if I was trying to smother her, if I showed any interest in her affairs. Her voice trembled with something like righteous indignation. She said I didn’t want to turn loose the apron strings. Me!" She stopped abruptly, having found it too easy after all to talk about her daughter to a stranger.

So you’re afraid everything is just fine, and she will chew you up good for thinking she couldn’t be alone for a month without your interference?

She sighed. She has the most cutting tongue I’ve ever heard. Ron says it’s our own fault: heredity, you know. If we hadn’t wanted bright, witty kids we shouldn’t have – she made a face – spawned.

I couldn’t help laughing. She smiled too, finally. It all seemed so ordinary and normal: Ozzie and Harriet in Olympia. Just a couple of doting parents, struggling with the fact that their bright, witty kids were growing up and away.

Perhaps too far away, in this instance.

A shadow crossed her face, as if she had caught my thought. She sat forward and carefully placed her coffee cup on the floor.

I can stand anything as long as nothing bad has happened to her. The last time we spoke on the phone, she hurt my feelings. I can’t even remember what she said now, that’s how important it was. I hung up on her. Oh, God! Tears began to leak silently from her eyes.

I never even told her I loved her. I always tell her. I kept waiting for her to call back. So we could make up. When she didn’t, I tried to call. There was no answer. I even tried to call at three in the morning! I just go through the motions of the day, waiting for a chance to call her. And she’s never there. She got up slowly, as if her unspoken fears had rendered her infirm. Pl-please excuse me, Mr. Hummel. Ron will be home soon.

She left me alone in the gathering gloom of the afternoon. A lone cormorant arrowed low across the bay, like something evil on the way back to hell. I drank my coffee and tried not to believe in premonitions.

Before I could get too morbid, tires crunched on gravel and her husband came home to his sad, chilly house on the bay.

Chapter Two

Ronald Filmore found me looking at a shadowy wall full of family photos, and turned on some lights. He was almost as tall as me, say six feet. His thinning hair was carefully combed and feathered. A slight paunch put a gentle curve in the bright silk tie that accentuated his crisp white shirt. His handshake was practiced and firm, as befitted a career civil servant with the Utilities and Transportation Commission.

I pointed to one of the photos. Is this your daughter? He nodded. It looked like a high school graduation photo. Her face was still youthfully round, but hinted at her mother’s bone structure and her dad’s determined brow. Her hair shone in the studio lights, and her eyes were laughing.

And this, and this, Filmore said. Soccer uniforms, bright faces smiling or squinting at the lens. Mrs. Filmore hadn’t always been hip-heavy; in her younger days she was stacked. Two kids, a boy and a girl, both with copper hair. Pigtails for the girl and a Beatle cut for the boy in their grade-school pictures. There was one of Jennifer in a baseball uniform, bat at the ready, peering through big-framed glasses with the concentration of an Alvin Davis. Later she was pudgy and cute in a swimsuit.

As I told you on the phone, Bob Woodford recommended you.

Woodford was a retired state trooper. He did insurance investigations for a loose consortium of ex-lawmen who had gone private upon retirement. Their firm crowded up the field, and they had the unfair advantage of the old-school tie when working with local cops, but they occasionally handed me crumbs when they were disinterested.

How old is your daughter now, Mr. Filmore?

She’s twenty.

Well, that cleared up why Woodford had passed the case along to me. Grown-up missing women are a dime a dozen. A lot of times they’re not that hard to find, for a professional. Almost as often, they don’t want to be found. The client is never happy to hear that. Contrary to popular belief, a lot of cops respect privacy more than the average citizen. When they were cops, Woodward’s colleagues would just tell the aggrieved party that their interest was unwanted, and go back to their case load. Accepting a client in search of a grown woman, now they were private, might conflict with their old code.

If the client was a useful contact in the state’s power structure, they could avoid the issue by passing him on to me. Lower rates, and the client could get mad at me if a gone woman’s disinclination to be found awoke my scruples. On the other hand, if it worked out to the client’s satisfaction, they both saved him some money and had a favor to call in.

Filmore was a quick student of facial language.

I know it seems mundane. Bob told me there are thousands of young women between the ages of eighteen and thirty listed as missing in one of those police computers. I never imagined there were so many.

Most of them probably aren’t missing, in the sense you mean, I told him. "They know where they are. They just went there without telling somebody who thinks they also have a right to know. Jealous boyfriend, nosey parent, people like that. Do you have any reason to suspect something might have happened to Jennifer?"

He’d winced when I said nosey parent. God, I hope not! This is all so – alien – to us. We’ve been married over twenty-five years, a house in the country, two kids and a cat, as Jennifer used to say. I think ours were the only kids in their school who still have the same mother and father they started with. We’ve had a pretty good life. No drugs or teen pregnancies, nothing like that. We thought it was a disaster when our son Brett got so many speeding tickets our insurance company dropped him.

Jennifer lives in Auburn?

She’s enrolled at Green River Community College. We moved our travel trailer to a mobile home court up there, so she could have her own place. It was cheaper than an apartment, and we weren’t using it since the kids grew up.

Did the college report her missing?

They won’t even tell us if she’s coming to school! They said it was irrelevant that we were paying the tuition. That’s the word that prissy bitch used. His voice wasn’t even anymore. Said they had to protect students’ privacy!

Do you know what classes she was taking? Who her teachers were?

He shook his head. She was going for her AA, so the usual thing, I suppose. Oh, she talked about the classes, and about the teachers, most of whom she considered terminally dumb, to use her phrase. But no specifics, no.

Boyfriend?

I’m pretty sure not. I’m afraid she considered most boys she encountered dumber than her teachers. She has a kind of overall disdain for boys at this stage of her life. She was always shy, and always a top student, and a bit of a bookworm. She seemed happiest forted up in her room with a book. Her room is lined with bookshelves, and not a spare inch. Everything from Jacques Cousteau to those fat romance novels.

I thought for a minute. Very close girl friends?

You’re not suggesting...

I raised a hand. The kind of girl you’re describing usually has very close chums she’s known all her life. Sleep over at each other’s house, spend a lot of time giggling over things, stuff like that. By this age, they’d be swapping boyfriend war stories. Details about each other’s lives they’re unlikely to tell their parents.

He nodded slowly. Of course we’ve asked Andrea. She lives down the street with her mother. Andrea hasn’t heard from her for about as long as us. I’m afraid we’ve lost touch with Michelle, her other best friend. Her father took a transfer to the DSHS office in Everett. That’s Department of Social and Health Services.

You said on the phone it’s been a month since you’ve heard from your daughter.

A look of fear flitted across his face. Over a month as near as we can tell. She usually came home for a weekend at least once a month. Usually she’d check in, maybe once a week, or we’d call her. She has a phone at the trailer.

Who pays the bill?

The bill goes to the trailer. She pays it out of her college money we give her. And the space rent, and other things.

You still are the registered owner of the trailer? You have duplicate keys?

Yes, of course. Why...?

I’ll need written permission from you to get into the trailer, or the park manager’s liable to call the police.

Of course.

Did you file an official missing persons report with the Auburn police?

But she’s from Olympia!

Not for these purposes. It’d be Auburn’s jurisdiction. I’m surprised Woodford didn’t tell you.

Maybe he did. I’m not tracking very well on this. Will you look for her for us?

We agreed to a retainer, and he wrote me a check. He gave me a key for the trailer and wrote me a permission slip.

Did you get a chance to go over your home phone bills?

I still don’t understand.

If she left voluntarily, it’s unlikely she just took off. Something changed in her life, and it probably involved people. She may have called someone long-distance.

He grimaced. This really is going to invade her privacy, isn’t it?

It’s that, or sit tight and hope everything is all right. I know of families still waiting after years.

Mildred did look at the bills. He led me into the kitchen; another great view of the water. The phone records were neatly laid out in the breakfast nook. Mildred highlighted several numbers on this one. This 448 prefix, for instance, doesn’t ring any bells with me. You?

Downtown Seattle. I looked at the number. Well, I’ll be damned.

He caught my tone. "You recognize the number?" He couldn’t believe it. I was pretty surprised myself.

"Yeah, the city desk of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer." The call had been made in February.

"We don’t even subscribe to the P-I."

Okay. I entered the number in my notebook, together with the others his wife had marked. I’ll need full names and phone numbers or addresses for Andrea and Michelle, too.

Mildred Filmore came into the room. Her eyes were reddened and puffy. Has Brett come in yet? I didn’t hear the boat.

Filmore shook his head. He’s out fishing for blackmouth, he told me.

Both their gazes were drawn to the twilit bay. I didn’t have to ask to know they were worrying him home, as my grandmother used to say. With their daughter missing, they would be doubly fearful every time he went out of their sight. Judged by Filmore’s comment about car insurance, and the fact Brett chased resident Chinook salmon out on the big salt in weather like this, he probably kept them on edge in the best of times.

Mr. Hummel wants to talk to Andrea, Filmore told his wife. But her mother is such a busybody...

Oh, go ahead! She sighed heavily. We wouldn’t want to deprive Phyllis of meeting a detective who quotes poetry, would we?

All right, honey. Then he cocked his head as if he suspected me of trying to put a move on his wife. Poetry? I thought that kind of thing only happened on TV.

It’s where I got all my training, I said.

Chapter Three

Before I left Seattle the next morning, I called my old chum Maury Teller, a copy editor for the Seattle P-I. It was a long shot, but I was anxious to get something moving on the case. We exchanged ritual insults, and I told him what was on my mind.

First he complained. You know how many college interns and copy clerks, let alone assistant editors, answer our damned main line? Then his nose for news twitched. Anything really hinky about this case so far, or is it just a gone girl?

So far, she’s just failed to report in to her parents. They’re hoping against hope she’s just exercising her independence. But they’re frightened.

"I don’t blame ‘em. King County is not the place for attractive young girls to wander loose. Look at its record: Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, and who knows how many wannabes out there in the rain. If I had a daughter, I’d keep her on a short leash."

You’d try, I said. These are the nineties. You might not have much luck.

Yeah, the gay nineties. Except the word has been corrupted in this century, and there’s not much to be gay about. In any sense of the word.

I drove to Auburn in a misting rain for which no native would bother to open a bumbershoot. There are as many varieties of rain here as flavors of latte. The Rainier Court manager lived in one of those doublewides that look fancier than most stick-built houses. She was a blowzy blonde wearing what they used to call a wrapper and honest-to-God hair curlers. She kept the screen door shut.

There’s no soliciting in this park, Mister. She sounded like she had a head cold. The tenants don’t like it.

I couldn’t solicit my way out of a wet paper bag. I held up Filmore’s note. I just wanted you to take a look at this.

She snorted a kind of a laugh. You ain’t a repo man, are you?

Nothing like that. I work for Mr. Filmore, who has his trailer parked here. He sent me up to check it over. His daughter goes to Green River?

Oh, sure. Jenny. Nice kid, nice parents, too. The kind of folks we like to stay with us. She cracked the screen door and looked at the note. Nothing’s wrong with the plumbing is there? Those travel trailers ain’t built the best in the world. You from th’ RV place?

I retrieved Filmore’s note. I don’t know anything about the plumbing being bad.

You got a key? I don’t think Jennifer’s home these days.

Traveling again?

Well, I don’t rightly know. Didn’t her daddy say?

Young Miss Filmore is well above the age of consent, I said. "As she lets her parents know from time to time. Just because they pay the rent here, and the college tuition, does not mean she has to keep them informed every time she cuts class to scoot off to the beach or British Columbia with her friends."

She let out a belly laugh. Gawd! Kids these days. Can you top ‘em? So Jenny’s like that with her folks, too, huh? Guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but she’s the politest little thing I’ve seen in a while. Always a smile and a hello. Half the retireds here are ready to adopt her, know what I mean?

They’d have to arm-wrestle Mildred Filmore, I said. She dotes on that girl.

That’s sweet! That’s the way it should be, you know? Kids wouldn’t get in half the trouble they do if their parents gave a damn. You see it on these talk shows all the time. Throwaway kids, that’s what most of ‘em are these days.

Jennifer hasn’t had any problems you know of, has she? Plumbing or anything else?

Hang on a minute. She turned. Sarah! C’mere a minute. A slim dark-haired girl came to the door. This’s my oldest, the manager said. Sarah went with Jenny to Victoria once. Didn’t you, honey? Your saying B.C. made me think about it, Mister. You know if Jenny’s off on a lark, honey?

The girl looked at me from under dark bangs. We never went to B.C. again. I don’t care what anybody tells you.

We never said you did, honey. You could go again if you wanted to. We ought to go when the weather gets nicer.

You’re always saying that. But we never go. Resentment bubbled in her tones.

Never mind that now. Do you know if Jenny’s gone off somewhere?

What if she has?

This nice man is a friend of her daddy’s, stopping by to check on her. That’s all. They just want to know she’s all right.

You look like another cop to me.

Another cop? I said. Why would a cop want to talk to Jennifer? She’s not in any trouble, is she?

You tell me.

Sarah, you stop that this minute.

I told those others, the girl said stubbornly. I don’t know nothing about what Jenny’s doing. If she’s gone somewhere she didn’t invite me this time, did she? Or I wouldn’t be here. I’m missing my program. She stalked back into the trailer.

Kids! the woman said. What’re you going to do?

The police were here asking about Jennifer Filmore?

Not to me. Why should they?

I don’t know. But I’d like to. I gave her my card. Would you call me if you can get anything out of Sarah?

I don’t know if I can. What does a parent ever know, right? That’s why you’re here, ain’t it?

She told me how to get to Space 37A, and I went over there. I wrote down Sarah’s name and address, just in case. The Filmore travel trailer turned out to be a twenty-eight-foot Wilderness, pretty large as travel trailers went, but dwarfed by the permanent units on either side. The carport was empty. There was a padlock on the storage room. I knocked lightly on the trailer door to avoid rousing the neighbors’ curiosity. No answer. I used the key. The heat was off and it seemed chillier inside than outside. The dank air was scented lightly with a seductive perfume. I closed the door and stood there, feeling like a prowler, while my eyes adjusted to the dim light through drawn curtains.

Miss Filmore? I said. Jennifer? Are you home?

The feathery brush of raindrops on the metal roof was my only answer.

The unit had a front kitchen. There was a bowl and plate in the sink, clean enough to use right now. I opened the compact refrigerator and sniffed. Nothing was going bad that I could tell. There was a carton of frozen yogurt and two ice trays in the small freezer. The dining booth was pretty much taken up by an old desktop computer, monitor and small printer. What flat space remained was covered with textbooks and assorted papers.

Down the narrow aisle past the bathroom, I turned on one of those little 12-volt overhead lights. There was a blue nylon sleeping bag neatly spread on the rear double bed. A stuffed teddy bear smiled at me from atop a mound of pillows. There was a mammoth ghetto blaster on the side table, and a small electric space heater near the bed. A pair of Nikes was lined precisely beside a pair of those black clunky shoes that were all the fashion for girls right then.

The closets smelled of cedar and that exotic perfume. Blouses, most of them silk, and an assortment of sweaters and sweatshirts. Neatly folded jeans in the bottom. Not a skirt or dress in sight. The drawers turned up undergarments and stacks of paperback books. The cupboards held more books, tape cassettes and a pile of compact disks.

In the tiny bathroom, more fresh young-woman smells: bath powder, shampoo, cologne. A big fluffy towel was folded neatly over the top of the coffin-sized shower. No men’s toiletries. I operated the toilet just because the manager had mentioned plumbing. It worked fine.

I traced a faint sour smell to a couple of empty half-gallon milk cartons under the kitchen counter. The expiration dates were recent. The garbage can was empty. I sat in front of the computer and glanced over the textbooks and school assignments. English, Sociology, Advanced Algebra. Three old-fashioned tractor-feed pages wound out of the little Okidata printer: an unfinished assignment on Mallory’s symbolism in the Arthurian legend. Handwritten algebra problems on a yellow pad.

In the cupboards above the dining nook, I turned up a rubber-banded stack of Christmas cards under a Victoria’s Secret catalog. All had been addressed to her in Olympia; the catalog had come to the trailer. Nothing leaped out at me from the scrawled notes on the Christmas cards, but one custom card had a gold-embossed signature line, Brigadier General (ret) and Mrs. J.G. Filmore. The card showed George Washington watching his men light candles on a Christmas tree in the snow. Beneath the embossing was a calligraphy-perfect signature, Uncle Jeff and Aunt Miranda, and a note saying young Jeffie had appreciated her kindness during his recent bereavement.

Another cupboard yielded a few dozen photos, still in their developers’ envelopes. The photos were crisp, taken through a good lens. I found the Filmores in a couple of them, and the park-manager’s daughter with another girl, posed against the Victoria waterfront. The other subjects, male and female and mostly young, didn’t have any messages for me in their watch-the-birdy grimaces. Jennifer turned out not to be the kind who wrote identities on the back, but she did seem the kind who recorded every outing. Since I couldn’t find a camera, maybe that was a good sign.

I found only one bill for the trailer phone. She hadn’t made many long-distance calls, but she was a talker when she did. One of the in-state phone numbers matched one I had written down from her parents’ bill, an Everett prefix: Michelle Romney, her high school chum who had moved up there. Two numbers had a 301 area code, which the phone book told me was in Maryland. Maryland didn’t tell me anything, but I copied them into my notebook.

Several of the textbooks had class work folded into them. Racial and Ethnic Groups turned up a neatly printed discourse on wartime detention of Japanese in the Pacific Northwest, and a couple of newspaper clippings about ongoing reparation debates. It also yielded an old, yellowed pamphlet, printed during World War Two, which justified relocation of the Nisei. The pamphlet gave generous credit for the concentration-camp legislation to one of the most famous Democratic Senators from this state. The day wasn’t a total loss; I had some cocktail trivia for my next encounter with a politically correct Democrat.

One of the textbooks was rubber-banded to a spiral notebook with My Major Project printed on the cover with a felt tip pen. The textbook surprised me: Criminal Investigation. My clients hadn’t mentioned their daughter was studying into law enforcement.

There was a news clipping from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tucked into the textbook when I slipped it out of the rubber band. The article was heavily highlighted. Its date and the P-I’s city-desk number were penciled in the margin. The article reported how the new DNA matching techniques had cleared up the identity of skeletal female remains believed to belong to a victim of the Green River Killer. The phone call to the P-I from the Filmore home had been made within a week of the article.

The notebook itself had the name of the reporter whose byline appeared on the DNA story, and the city desk phone number, followed by copious notes from what she abbreviated as: telcon w/reporter. She had underlined hair follicles three times, followed by roots required! There were reminders to herself to check the college library computer for more source material, and the names of what she identified as three different private laboratories that were specializing in the new DNA testing. None of them were in Maryland.

I put the reporter’s name in my notebook along with the headline of the story. It probably was just another dead end, homework for the investigation class, but I’d check it out.

There was a little green college folder tucked in the algebra book, college issue, with all her teachers and her advisors entered carefully in a nice round hand. She was