Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 1. Whole No. 797, January 2008

The Moorhead House by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is equally comfortable writing either mystery or science fiction. A former editor-in-chief of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, she has authored many works that belong purely to science fiction. And she is also, under the pseudonym Kris Nelscott, the author of an Edgar-nominated mystery series. Her most recent book, Recovery Man, is part of an “interplanetary detective series,” and combines her talents in both genres.

The house on the hill had Christmas lights.

I stopped beside my van — white, with DUSTY’S CLEANING lettered in discreet gold. The van was camouflage — official enough, without advertising the kind of work I actually did — but people knew anyway. Hard to miss when the guy down the street offs himself and a woman in a hazard suit, driving a van loaded with cleaning supplies, shows up a few days later.

But that day, I was alone. I was touring a cleaned scene, making sure my team had gotten every last bit. I wore my coveralls, a mask, and three pairs of gloves, but I hadn’t gone for the full treatment, thinking it unnecessary.

The neighborhood was solidly Oregon middle-class: old Victorians, 1930s bungalows, a few ranches; late-model cars, all probably bought on time; and lovely yards with only a little grass and lots of perennials. The kind of neighborhood a prospective buyer would look at and think of as a nice place to raise kids, the kind of place you grow old in, where your neighbors watch out for you and keep track of every little thing.

But I’d been here four times in the ten years I’d owned this business — for the Hansen suicide (right in the living room, where the kids couldn’t miss it. Bastard); the Palmer home-invasion-gone-wrong (the crime-scene techs had missed the cat, curled up under the stove where it had apparently crawled to nurse its wounds); the well-known Bransted murder (the little girl had been dragged into a nearby garage and gutted there, mercifully after death); and the Moorhead ritual slaughter in the Victorian up the hill.

At least, the authorities believed it was a ritual slaughter. They never did find the bodies, although that place had four different high-velocity spatters, and all sorts of ritualistic items — knives, black candles, destroyed crosses. That was the only case I’d ever been called to testify in, mostly because the members of that cult were convicted even though no one ever found the victims.

The murders had occurred over Christmas.

The first time I’d seen the Moorhead place, it’d been covered with Christmas lights like something out of a Hallmark greeting. All it had needed was two feet of snow, and a few carolers out front holding their lanterns, their red-cheeked faces upturned in wholesome, rapturous praise.

My first partner’d quit after that job. Not that I blamed her. The Moorhead job had left me shaken too, and I’m not the shakeable type. I’m a former firefighter and EMT, one of the first women in the state to do that kind of work, and I’ve battled both flame and discrimination with equal ferocity. I’ve seen what people can do to each other, and I’ve learned to accept it most of the time.

Since then, the Moorhead house had sold more than once, but no one has ever been able to live there long. As far as I knew, the place had been empty for years.

The Christmas lights bothered me.

They were up in the same place those original lights had been, white icicles — popular ten years ago — dripping down like melted frosting off the gables and the eaves of the Queen Anne. So much like that dusky winter afternoon when I’d seen the destruction for the first time.

Back then, I had no clue how to handle the tears that cleaning a drop of blood from the back of a lamp might bring. I tried to pretend that I was just cleaning a place, a very filthy place, and I was beginning to realize that would never really work, that you couldn’t stop the brain from wondering how it must’ve felt to be among the screams and the crashing and the glinting knife.

The state waited nearly a month before letting us in. By then, the place smelled like ancient rot and old blood.

That smell came back to me as I stared at those lights, promising a festive afternoon to anyone who would just march up the hill and knock.

“Who’s in the Moorhead house?” I asked when I got back to the office. “Office” is too big a word for the place: That makes it sound like we all have desks and secretaries and official nameplates. In reality, I have a tiny office and the rest of the place is two rooms — the front area with a desk, a phone, and a Coke machine that Debbie insisted on, as well as a warehouse-style back room, filled with all manner of cleaning equipment, industrial-strength showers, and five commercial washer and dryer sets.

Marcus sat behind the desk that afternoon. He’s a big guy with a deep, reassuring voice, the kind folks like to hear when they’ve had a death in the family and decide to hire us themselves.

“Seen the lights, huh?” he said, leaning back in his chair and folding his massive hands over his surprisingly flat stomach.

“Yeah.” I punched the Coke machine, and a root beer fell out.

We’d long ago bought the cola people out, filled the machine with our favorite cans, and shut off the payment mechanism. Now the thing works like an oversized (and expensive) refrigerator. I don’t get rid of it, though, because it’s the only nifty part of our office.

“To be honest,” I said, popping the top, “it scared me a little.”

“Dwayne said that too.”

I’d forgotten Dwayne worked the second part of that job — when the first set of new owners somehow got it into their heads that the tiny bones in the septic system belonged to the murdered family. The bones actually belonged to a family of squirrels. But by then, the crime-scene techs had been back to the house and the lawn dug up. The mess was incredible, and the crime-scene people decided to call us.

Not that it mattered to the first new owners. They sold as soon as the place was presentable again.

“How come that job weirded you out?” Marcus asked.

I shrugged, took a sip of the root beer, and said, “Sometimes I wonder why more jobs don’t weird me out.”

“Nice avoidance,” he said. “Now answer.”

I smiled at him. “Because there’re no bodies.”

“There’re never any bodies when we go in,” he said.

Which wasn’t entirely true. There was that cat in the Palmer house and farther downtown, a stray dog left on the back porch. One of our other cleaning teams discovered an infant in a back closet, an infant who hadn’t been part of the murder that the team had been cleaning up.

But I got Marcus’s point. The bodies that we cleaned up after were long gone by the time we got to the house. We always knew what happened — we had to, so that we would know where to look for debris or spatter or pieces of skin — but we almost never saw the corpse.

“I think it would have been easier if there had been bodies.” I set the root beer down. “It was the uncertainty.”

Or maybe it had been my uncertainty. As an EMT, I’d pulled dying people out of car wrecks. As a firefighter, I’d been at houses where the children didn’t get out, where the remaining person on the fifth floor refused to jump, where entire families died in their sleep.

But nothing prepared me for the emptiness of a crime scene. The moved furniture, the ruined rugs, the destroyed curtains. The toys that were pushed against the wall, the broken vases, the shattered lamps.

We couldn’t repair that stuff. Our mission was to make sure no one could tell a violent or neglected death had happened in this place. And if the family still lived there, our mission was to make the place look like it had before what we euphemistically called “The Event.”

But the Moorhead house was the first place I worked without a family to move back in or without an owner overseeing the job we did on the rental property.

No family left, no extended family leaving messages on my machine, no potential owners waiting to rebuild the place according to their new vision.

I tried not to look at the Moorhead house as I drove to my next job. It wasn’t far away — another suicide, damn the holiday season — and from the back door of a kitchen that hadn’t been cleaned since 1978, I could see the lights of the Moorhead house against the rain-darkened sky.

I tried to ignore it, to concentrate on the life lost, the loneliness that seemed to be the cause. This man hadn’t been found for nearly two weeks, which put his death on Thanksgiving Day. The remains of a small turkey and the store-bought pumpkin pie confirmed that.

He had family — an estranged wife who hadn’t seen him in nearly thirty years, two children now grown, and parents who sounded genuinely hurt when they hired us over the phone.

I’d learned, though, that genuine hurt sometimes sounded brusque or businesslike, not thick with tears. And I wondered about a man whose house was so dirty that the neighbors didn’t complain about the odor because they were used to odors coming from the place.

I never told my coworkers that I thought about the dead as if I were the last person who would remember them. Sometimes, perhaps, I was. Certainly the family of that man wouldn’t know how bleak his life was at the end. Even if one of us told them, they wouldn’t be able to imagine the piled-up papers, the half-written letters, the battered but comfortable chair in front of the TV.

I recognized this house because it was a filthy version of my own.

My place is spotless. Because my hours are long and my moods uncertain, I don’t keep a pet. I have the battered but comfortable single chair in front of a too-big television, only it’s in my basement, not the center of the living room.

If someone asked me, I’d never admit to being lonely.

Usually I don’t mind.

Except on difficult days, when I’m cleaning out someone else’s solitary home.

The invitation came two days later. The city’s annual bash, held for the contractors and private firms that kept the city running, was always a big deal. The planners spared no expense. Once they rented a yacht to follow the old ferry route across the river. Another time, they commandeered the largest, trendiest nightclub in the city. And one time — the only time (because too many people complained) — they held a beautiful secular service at the city’s historic Presbyterian church.

This year, however. This year’s site was a stunner.

Debbie handed me the invite not three minutes after the mail arrived. I was sitting in my office, enjoying a rare moment of quiet. I had that week’s checks spread in front of me. I was thinking about the bank deposit, and having a healthy bank balance at the Christmas holidays for the first time since I’d opened the business.

“Boss,” Debbie said.

I looked up. Her normally dusky skin had paled to an abnormal gray color. She held the invitation between her thumb and forefinger as if it smelled bad.

It didn’t look bad. In fact, I recognized it. We usually didn’t get formal invitations here, not the kind with the gold foil borders and the calligraphic writing.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

She handed it to me. It was on a stiff cardboard stock that felt like expensive parchment. I glanced at the language, familiar after ten years of parties.

“The annual party,” I said. “So?”

“Look where they’re holding it.”

I did. And felt the blood leave my face as well.

The Moorhead house.

“Get me the envelope,” I said.

She went back to reception. I could see her through my door, rummaging through the wastebasket. When she finally found the envelope, she carried it back to me in the same way she had carried the invite itself — thumb and forefinger, as if the entire thing would infect her.

I took the envelope from her. It was made of a matching stock and had a metered city-hall postmark from the day before. If someone had sent this as a joke, they would have had to duplicate the card stock and use the city-hall postage meter, which gets guarded like crazy so that city-hall employees don’t use it for personal letters.

“Crap,” I said, and reached for the phone.

I dialed the RSVP number at the bottom of the invite. After a few rings, I got the voice mail of a person I didn’t know. I hung up and dialed the deputy mayor, Greg Raabe. We had gone to college together. We’d even dated a few times before I had found my calling and before he had met his wife.

His secretary picked up immediately, and when she heard it was me, she put me through even faster.

“Greg,” I said without preamble, “what’s this about the Christmas party being at the Moorhead house? Do you remember what happened there?”

“I remember,” he said, which was not the response I expected. I expected some political dance. The fact that he answered — and sounded disgusted — meant that he had fielded more than one call about this.

“Don’t you think this is a little inappropriate?”

“What I think doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s a done deal.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because,” he said, “the city bought the building. They plan to turn it into a museum.”

That was the thing about the Moorhead house, the thing no one talked about anymore. Shortly after the family died, the National Register of Historic Places placed the house on its registry. Apparently someone had gone through the entire historic-preservation rigmarole in the years before the murders.

Fortunately for me, the certification came after we cleaned the place up. If it had come before, the job would have taken much longer, and the city would have been billed for a great deal more money.

Historic preservation crime-scene cleaning required an entirely different use of chemicals, several kinds of oversight.

I’d managed to overlook most of that and had, in fact, forgotten it, until Greg Raabe had said the word “museum.”

The Moorhead house had been the first home built on this side of the river. The fabulously wealthy Moorheads had made their money in various enterprises in the Oregon territory, from logging to mining to trading supplies. Then they bought up the land surrounding the river, and sold it, piecemeal, to settlers coming down the Oregon Trail.

The Moorheads kept large portions of the land, however, much of it near the river, so that they could control the ferries (the only way to get across and head to Portland, even then the state’s major city). The river also gave them added control of the logging industry. In those days, logs floated down the river to be collected at sloughs which were also owned by the Moorheads. Over time, the river land became a center for what little industry the city had, and the rents made the Moorheads even wealthier.

But they became enchanted with their wealth, and wanted a lot more power than owning a single small city would give them. The great-grandsons of the original family moved to Portland, where they bought even grander houses on even grander hills. Their sons became politicians, and their children became drug-addicted deadbeats who had every privilege.

Somewhere along the way, the holdings here got sold. Then the houses in Portland went, and finally, the famous family, now down to an infamous few, had only enough left to maintain their townhouses in Washington, D.C.

The Moorhead house, symbol of the wealth and power of a bygone age, had — even before the federal government decided to protect it — become the symbol of death and destruction in the modern age.

“A museum?” I asked.

“People love a mystery,” Greg said in that dryly bland voice, the one I always thought of as his political voice. “And the house is truly historical. The museum will have one room dedicated to the murders, but it’ll be upstairs. The rest’ll talk about city history, the impact of the Moorheads, and the way that this part of Oregon once seemed like the center of the universe.”

Then I knew he was being sarcastic. He never used that phrase in serious conversation.

“Whose idea was this?” I asked.

“You read about it in the papers?” he asked as if that was an answer.

“No,” I said.

“Then think about it.”

I did, and it only took me a minute to understand. The mayor had done this. The mayor, Louise Vogel, had set herself up as a minor dictator, much to the disgust of everyone outside of her party and even some within.

She had the benefit of being one of the few people in the city who would take the job, which paid next to nothing for the amount of work involved. Greg had become deputy mayor as a sort of oversight position, but she had defanged him quickly. She owned much of the council, bought, I was told, with a combination of blood money and blackmail threats. The woman knew how to run small-city politics.

“Why in the world would Louise want the Moorhead house as a museum?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Greg said. “Makes as much sense to me as holding a Christmas party there. So, are you coming?”

“I cleaned the place, Greg,” I said softly. “I had to testify at the trial.”

“Oh.” He was silent for a moment. Then he sighed. “I’m supposed to jolly people into attending.”

“Has it been working?”

“So far,” he said. “Apparently, people like to pretend they’re not interested in death houses, but they really are.”

Unless they see the houses in full aftermath.

“I suppose it’ll be a grand affair,” I said, mimicking his dry voice.

“It’ll be memorable, that’s for sure,” he said, and signed off.

I held onto the phone for a moment longer, mostly to fend off Debbie’s questions. As she listened to my conversation, she seemed to have gotten ahold of herself. She shook her head and shifted from foot to foot.

I set the receiver down. “It’s no joke.”

She swallowed. “Are we going?”

The city’s party was always the highlight of our year.

“Greg says the party’ll be memorable,” I said.

“People will talk about it for a long time,” she said.

I adjusted some of the checks in front of me. My pleasure in my unusual wealth at year’s end had faded.

“Let’s make attendance optional this year,” I said. “And before anyone agrees to go, make sure they know that the party’ll be at Moorhead house.”

“Okay.” Debbie started to leave my office, then she paused at the door. “You going?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and realized, to my surprise, that I had just spoken the truth.

I suppose, politically, I should have said I was going to go. My job, after all, was to make buildings habitable again. Part of habitable was holding festive events — weddings, bar mitzvahs, Christmas parties.

But habitable was different from comfortable. And habitable wasn’t always possible.

Places like the Moorhead house were notorious, and notoriety lingered long after the physical examples of the crimes had disappeared.

In the end, it was my curiosity that took me there. I wanted to see the house in all its glory. I wanted to know if it could still have glory.

And I wanted to know exactly what Louise Vogel was up to this time.

No one else from the office wanted to go. Debbie actually called me ghoulish, even though I wasn’t the person holding the party. Dwayne looked at me with pity, asked me if I was sure, and when I said I was, he visibly shuddered. Then he told me, quietly, that he’d never go in that house again, not even if I paid him to do so.

In the end, Marcus went with me, mostly because he was curious. He’d been hired long after I did the first part of the Moorhead house job, but he was there for the tail end of the trial, and for Dwayne’s run at the tiny bones in the sewers. Marcus told me he’d always wanted to go inside, and acknowledged that it was an unhealthy curiosity, based as much on the missing bodies as it was on the effect the entire place had had on our office.

He picked me up at eight. I’d forgotten how well he cleaned up. He wore a long jacket over dress pants — a modern suit that harked back to the Old West — and instead of looking like a football player stuffed into his younger brother’s clothing, he looked like something out of GQ.

I felt dowdy in comparison. I wore a black velvet dress, and I decked it with a red scarf and some glittery (but fake) jewelry I’d inherited from my great-aunt. My matching black velvet heels required, of all things, dusting, and I had to run out an hour before the party to buy panty hose without runs or pulls.

Marcus waited inside my foyer while I dithered over coats and purses, feeling more like a girl-girl than I had for a while. Once upon a time, I had cared about things like makeup and matching purses with shoes, but I had lost that at nineteen when I’d come home from college to find my mother dead of a stroke on the kitchen floor.

She had been there for a week. My parents were divorced — my father lived in another state — and I was an only child. I had come home to surprise my mother, and instead, she had surprised me.

Marcus had a 1960s Mustang that he took out for special occasions, and apparently this ranked as one of those. He drove to the Moorhead house in silence. Normally, we would have chattered the entire way — Marcus and I share the same taste in movies, books, and politics — but those subjects paled in comparison to the house.

The Mustang rode lower than my van, so the view of the Moorhead house as we turned onto the street below seemed even more impressive than usual. This close to Christmas, you’d think other homes on the block would have decorations on the windows or lights strung outside, but the Moorhead house seemed to be the only one with Christmas spirit.

I looked up at the place as we started toward the drive, and those icicle lights still sent a chill through me. I almost told Marcus to turn around and I’d buy him dinner at a nearby steakhouse so we wouldn’t waste the dress-up clothes, but I didn’t. I knew better than to seem weak in front of one of my employees.

I’d learned that lesson as a female firefighter. Even when you felt uncomfortable, you took a deep breath and went into the smoke. To do anything less meant you couldn’t perform your duties.

And somehow, this party had become one of my duties.

We were arriving deliberately late. I hated showing up early to any party. Marcus pulled the Mustang into the circular drive, and my breath caught.

Some things were different: The hedges had been clipped to the bone and did not have lights hanging from them as they had that murderous Christmas season. Signs had been planted in what had been the yard but was now obviously going to be a garden, warning guests to stay on the paths. The signs had been hand-calligraphed, and looked expensive. They even had little drawings of holly around the edges.

I hated them.

Marcus looked at me as he got out of the Mustang, and then he grinned like a little boy who was about to do something wrong.

“Ready, boss?” he asked.

I’d never be ready, but I smiled gamely and put my hand on his massive arm. He helped me pick my way across the path. The air was cold and damp, but the pine boughs near the house gave off a Christmasy scent that I hadn’t expected.

Suddenly I felt younger than I had in years, almost like that girl I’d left in my mother’s kitchen, and my heart lifted. A party was just what I needed. If I could forget the house, or at least look on its new role as host as a personal victory, I might be able to have a good time.

We stepped onto the porch together. Inside the frosted glass windows, we could see shapes moving against yellow light.

My stomach clenched, and I swallowed convulsively.

I wasn’t sure I could do this.

Marcus gave me a sideways glance. “You okay?”

I nodded because I couldn’t answer. He knocked on the door.

Someone pulled it open and the smells of burning wood and baking cookies filled the air. Laughter came along with Mel Tormé’s voice, singing about Jack Frost nipping at noses. The man who opened the door had a Santa hat over graying hair. The hat didn’t go with his exquisitely tailored suit.

He held a glass clearly filled with eggnog in one hand. With the other, he gestured toward the interior. “Merry, merry!”

“Happy, happy,” Marcus said, making fun of him.

But the man didn’t seem to notice. He clapped Marcus on the back as we walked inside.

The place was transformed. If I hadn’t known it was the house in which I’d spent a week cleaning, I wouldn’t have recognized it. To my right, the curved staircase was once again the center of the house. Someone had wrapped garlands of holly around the mahogany banister, probably with no thought for how old, how rare, or how valuable the wood was.

People stood on the stairs, holding drinks, talking, some looking at the portraits hung over the stairs, others heading up to see what else the house had in store.

Coats were piled on top of the telephone seat built against the wall. The carpets were gone, revealing wood floors that matched the wood trim throughout the house.

I couldn’t imagine what it had cost to clean the floors. I had cleaned the carpets and recommended their removal, but no one had done that — at least not for the first family who bought the place. I had warned the realtors that if anyone took up the carpets, they might find horrible stains beneath. I had removed the rugs myself in the upstairs bedroom where two of the family members had bled to death (there was no saving those rugs, and no attempt to), but the ones down here had had bloody footprints and drag marks, and other stains that I never could quite identify.

“You’re staring,” Marcus whispered.

At least, I thought he whispered it, although he might have spoken in a normal tone. The party noises going on around us made it hard to hear much more than the rumble of conversation. The music was classy and so were the people around me. Hard to believe most of them spent their days in jeans and overalls or uniforms paid for by the city.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

“Is it different?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

I led Marcus into what had once been the front parlor. The pocket doors were gone, along with most of the walls that contained them, so now the front and back parlors were one room (with an arch) that modern people would call the living room.

The furniture was fake period, with a fainting couch, a regular couch, and overstuffed armchairs. Too many tables crowded the bay window, and on those tables stood food of all sorts, from cookies and sliced pies to small unidentifiable appetizers and toothpicked bits of fruit and cheese.

Marcus grabbed a small plate, shaking it with surprise. “China.”

“Nothing but the best,” I muttered, and doubted he could hear me.

I couldn’t eat, even if I’d wanted to. I left him there, debating whether to have strawberries dipped in chocolate or chocolate-covered cherry trifles. From a passing waiter carrying a tray of beverages on his outstretched palm, I snatched a flute of champagne, carrying it with me as I went from room to room.

The place had clearly been professionally decorated. From the furniture to the draped pine boughs and hanging mistletoe, the interior looked like something out of House Beautiful.

The Christmas tree, at the far wall of what had been the back parlor, took up so much space that it seemed to be growing out of the floor. It was decorated in silver bows, tinsel, and little silver lights that blinked on and off. An embarrassing display of packages hid the lower branches.

I knew from previous parties that the packages would be gone by the night’s end, a mound of paper left for someone else to clean up, and the gifts would seem less impressive unwrapped than they did at this moment.

A Do-Not-Enter sign had been taped to the swinging kitchen door, the only infelicity in the entire place. I ignored it, and went inside anyway, drawn by the smell of baking cookies. Small women in rented tuxedos, and looking hot, wiped hair away from their faces. Two coaxed a stainless-steel dishwasher to take more dishes. Another woman bent over the stove, and yet another was placing crudités on a silver tray.

Men as tall as the women were small picked up the trays. The men also wore tuxes, but on them, the tuxes looked natural. Maybe because they were in traditional serving roles, where the women, stuck in the kitchen, should have been in simple black dresses with aprons to complete the servant illusion.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” said the woman filling the trays.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I used to work here.”

One of the men looked at me sharply. He frowned a little, as if wondering how anyone could have worked here, given the history of the house. Or maybe I was reading too much into a slight reaction. Maybe he thought my lame excuse for being in the kitchen was just that. I smiled at him, and slipped out of the way.

The kitchen was dramatically different, remodeled about the time of the bones discovered in the sewer drain. The stove was restaurant quality, the refrigerator one of those stainless-steel sub-zero monstrosities that looked like it could eat an entire room.

Everything was different, and somehow I found that more disconcerting than the Christmas decorations around front. When I had cleaned this place, the kitchen had been my haven — the only room without much blood in the entire house, and that blood only came from the detectives and crime-scene techs. Harmless, innocuous drops, left by people who were trying to solve the crime, not the people who had done it.

My stomach was churning. The smell of food was making me ill. I pushed open the swinging door and stepped back into the living room.

Marcus was talking to a pretty woman in a slinky blue dress. Louise was standing near the tree, gesturing at the presents. She looked even thinner than usual, her face bony, her black hair pulled into a tight bun.

Her gaze caught mine, flat and challenging. I lifted my still-full glass in a silent toast. She smiled — a real and warm smile, something I had never seen from her before — and raised her glass as well. We drank in concert from separate parts of the room as if we were old friends.

“I see you’ve kissed and made up.” Greg Raabe, the deputy mayor who had told me about this debacle, had sidled up beside me. He knew how much I disliked Louise, and how that feeling seemed to be mutual.

I turned to him and smiled. He no longer looked like the boy I’d dated in school. That boy had been reedy slender and blond, with no muscles at all. His bright blue eyes had dominated his face.

The eyes remained the same, dominating and filled with personality, but the rest of him had changed. He was as heavy as he had once been slight, and in place of those visible ribs were rock-hard abs from all the weights he lifted. He ate to compensate for the tension, I think, because he didn’t drink or smoke, and to compensate for the eating, he exercised.

“There was no kissing,” I said to him, happier than I wanted to be to see him. “I just saluted her, that’s all. This is quite the party.”

“This is quite the expense,” he said. “Imagine what the council will say when they see this on the city budget.”

I grinned. “Fortunately, that’s not my job.”

“But it could be mine,” he said, looking at Louise talking to the man near the presents. “I was kind of hoping that once she had her stepping-stone to the governorship, I could become mayor.”

“One party won’t get in the way,” I said.

“You’re assuming that this party is the only budget item that’ll bother them.” He sighed and grabbed his own champagne flute from a passing waiter.

I looked up at the waiter as he went by. It was the man who had frowned in the kitchen. He looked familiar. His skin was a ruddy color that wasn’t common in the Pacific Northwest, except among people who worked on the ocean. He had a square jaw, and hard cheekbones, the kind I always associated with those 1930s pictures of Aryan youth.

“Know him?” Greg asked.

“He looks familiar,” I said as he went into the kitchen. “Does he to you?”

“In a generic waiterly way.” Greg smiled. “I told Louise we should have dancing, but she didn’t listen to me.”

“There’s no room,” I said. Besides, Greg wouldn’t have been able to dance with me even if there had been music. His wife Emma pretended that the fact that we’d dated didn’t bother her, when, in fact, it was very clear that it did.

I scanned the room, but didn’t see her. “Is Emma upstairs?”

The smile left his face. “She wouldn’t come.”

“Because of the house?” I asked.

“Because of the separation.” His voice was low. “She doesn’t like my ambitions.”

Emma had always wanted Greg to settle down and make money. He had always been more interested in public service than in making monetary use of his expensive law degree. Apparently the fights had come to a head.

“When did you separate?” I asked.

He shushed me and whispered, “Not everyone knows.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“It happened last week. I have an apartment near City Hall, which I’d had anyway. I guess I knew this was coming.”

Everyone had known this was coming, maybe even from the moment the vows were taken. But Greg seemed quietly devastated.

I put my hand on his shoulder, startled to feel the same kind of muscles I had felt on Marcus. “I’m really sorry,” I said again.

Greg grinned. The look didn’t quite meet his eyes. “No, you’re not. You never liked Emma.”

Not many of his friends had, and I always figured the ones who had liked her just pretended for Greg’s sake.

“I am sorry,” I said. “For you. This is hard.”

“Yeah,” he said, and then sighed. “Duty beckons.”

Duty didn’t, but Louise did. She was waving him over with a hand so manicured I could see the shine of the nail polish from here. Time for the packages. I hoped they got to my name quickly. I was ready to leave.

Marcus had left his new conquest and came over beside me. “Did you check the upstairs?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t forgotten the upstairs, but I didn’t see the need to torture myself. “I ducked into the kitchen for a while.”

Which reminded me of the waiter, whom I no longer saw. “Did you notice that waiter, the one who looked like he’d been a member of the Hitler Youth?”

“No,” Marcus said. “Why?”

Greg had clapped his hands for quiet. I sighed. I knew this drill. First they’d demand silence, then they’d hand out gifts. Louise worked off a list. I had noted last year that the city contractors like me got one of two things: an espresso maker (if the city had spent a lot of money on you) or a care basket filled with all kinds of city products, like salmon and some of our famous cheese and locally grown filberts.

I, of course, had gotten a care basket, even though the city spent a lot of money on our services. I thought that it was merely an oversight, then Greg had reminded me that we weren’t listed in the budget. We were buried in other line items. So no one really knew how much money we made cleaning up local property except maybe Debbie and me.

Greg started calling out names. The man beside Louise handed out the packages, and Louise kept charge of the list. People walked up, got large gaudily wrapped gifts, and then walked away, grinning.

Marcus rolled his eyes. “How long is this going to take?”

“Usually about an hour,” I said. “You want to go back and make goo-goo eyes at that sweet young thing?”

“She’s hard to talk to,” he said.

“Because?” I asked.

His face shut down. “Because I told her what I do.”

That was one of the major drawbacks to our business. People thought we were on the level of gravediggers and morticians. Even the popularity of programs like CSI, which made one small aspect of death work glamorous, didn’t spill over to us.

“Tough break,” I said.

He shrugged. “Anyone with reactions like that’s too shallow for me.”

But he didn’t sound sincere. And then he took my champagne and finished it for me. I watched him drink another, and decided that at some point in the evening I’d have to wrestle the Mustang’s keys from him and get us home.

It took two more hours before we could leave. I never did see the waiter again, but I got absorbed in my present — a small wireless weather-forecasting kit, with barometer and thermometer, something that actually appealed to my scientific sensibilities. Marcus slowed on the drinks — he’d found another pretty woman to chat up, and apparently this time he didn’t make the mistake of telling her what he did — and I didn’t want to interrupt his rhythm.

I looked at the stairs twice, but I didn’t go up them. I searched for Greg, and found Louise instead. She was leaning against a side of the arch, holding but not drinking a glass of champagne. She watched the proceedings with tired eyes.

When she saw me, she smiled again.

I wasn’t sure I liked that. Two real smiles from Louise in one evening. Something had to be wrong.

“It’s going well, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Better than I would have thought,” I said.

She sipped the champagne — or pretended to. Maybe that was one of her secrets. Pretending to drink when everyone around her got blotto.

“It’s a tribute to you people,” she said.

At first, I thought she meant the little people, the non-politicos, and then I realized she actually meant us, Dusty’s Cleaning.

“Thanks,” I said, glancing at those stairs.

“I mean it,” she said. “This place is cheerful. Who would have thought?”

I looked at her. Her entire face looked tired, and she was too thin. Maybe it was the strain of the party, or maybe something else had gone wrong in her life. I wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t about to ask.

“It’s what we do,” I said.

“Exorcise the ghosts,” she said, as if in agreement.

But the ghosts weren’t exorcised for me. They still lurked beneath the party favors and the seasonal joy. When this crowd left, and the caterers finished, when the last staff member shut off the lights, the house would revert to its post-murder self. The high-velocity spatter would paint itself on the walls, the cries would echo in the upstairs bedroom, and the blood would seep into the rugs.

I shuddered. I couldn’t help it.

Of course, Louise noticed. “Does it still bother you?”

“Sometimes,” I said before I could stop myself, “I think places like this should be burned.”

Louise frowned at me. “That’s an odd sentiment, coming from you.”

I shrugged. “There are some places,” I said, “that never get entirely clean.”

The dream came as it often did. It started with my mother. She was on the floor of our kitchen, the smell of Lemon Pledge filling the air. When she saw me, she stood, apologized, and offered to cook. I thought it inappropriate to have the newly dead make the meal, and I told her so, even though I knew I was disappointing her.

She slipped out the side door, and as she did, she said, “You’ll never see me again.”

Only as I mulled over the words, I realized she hadn’t said “see,” she had said “find.” You’ll never find me again.

Then, in the transitionless magic of dreams, I stood in the foyer of the Moorhead house. The place smelled of weeks-old blood and voided bowels. Beneath those smells was that of rotted flesh.

As I stood there, I existed on two levels: the woman standing in the foyer, and the woman who knew every inch of that house, the one who had cleaned it all and who would, if she wasn’t careful, become obsessed with it.

The walls in the upstairs bedroom had a spatter pattern that looked like a post-modernist painting. I knew that it was spray — a knife or something sharp pierced an artery, and the blood sprayed before the dying man? woman? child? turned so that the rest of the blood would shoot against a different wall.

Then the dream changed. The waiter stared at me with those cold blue eyes. I’d seen them before. Not at a party where he was curiously out of place but at the trial.

He sat in the second row from the back, and watched my every move. His face wasn’t ruddy then, but he was thinner, sadder, and his eyes had fear in them.

I couldn’t look at him as I testified. He made me nervous.

That day, everyone made me nervous.

I thought nothing of it.

You’ll never find me again.

Then the scene changed once more. My mother’s kitchen, without her body lying in the middle of the floor, looked like a happy place — painted yellow, spotlessly clean. Only a chair had moved, tilted away from the table, as if its occupant left suddenly.

Add the body to the picture, sprawled along the tile, arms thrown backward, fluids staining the clothes, and the moved chair was ominous. Had she stood because she felt ill? Or had she simply been crossing to the refrigerator when her body gave out?

Or had she been lying there, helpless, only able to slide a chair a little toward her, thinking maybe it would help her up, but the experiment didn’t work, and she remained — alone — on her back, until she breathed her last.

I sat up, not sure exactly when I woke, when the dream ended and the thinking began.

We could guess about the bodies in the Moorhead house, but we didn’t know. We didn’t know if the ritual items — the desecrated religious symbols, the black candles, the knives — had been added later to throw us off. Because they had been removed as evidence before I arrived, I didn’t even know if they’d been covered with spatter, proving they’d been in position before the family died.

I did know that they left no impression wherever they’d been. There were no knife-sized holes in the spatter pattern, no black candle wax on the side tables.

Only the blood and the stink and the sense that something horrible had happened here.

I turned on my too-large television. One of the get-rich-quick real-estate gurus hawked his no-money-down method. As house after house flashed on the screen, I wondered what secrets those houses held.

Over time, the secrets faded.

All bodies disappeared, forgotten, lost.

Did the people who owned my mother’s house now enjoy their kitchen? Did they walk easily over the spot where she had spent her last hours? Did they wonder how long her body had been there, waiting for someone to find her?

More importantly, did they care?

And that’s when my stomach turned, when the crazy food I had eaten backed up into my throat.

No one had cared at the Moorhead house party. If the murders were mentioned, it was with a salacious edge, as if the deaths were part of a setting, added for the partygoers’ enjoyment.

Five people were missing, presumed dead — presumed because no one lost that much blood and lived.

But the police hadn’t tested every drop. Only a few to make DNA comparisons, enough to build a case without a body — one of the toughest murder cases to bring. The cult — arrested, charged, and pulled off the street for life — had continually maintained their innocence.

I hadn’t been able to look at them either when I testified — malnourished, scared twenty-somethings who’d used too many drugs and lived too close to the crime scene.

People had seen them in the house, but no one had seen them on the night of the murders.

No one had seen anything that night, even though the house dominated that hillside.

Even though the house dominated the entire town.

The next morning, we had a fire-clean. Mostly smoke and water damage. The apartment, on the lower floor of a large complex, had lost its kitchen, and the rest was ruined. But the upper floors were still livable if we could get the stench out, which we could.

The apartments had been evacuated, but they still held the stuff of people’s lives — dolls scattered on a bedroom floor, slippers kicked aside in someone’s haste to escape, a half-eaten pizza on a scarred coffee table.

I surveyed the damage, realized the cleaning would be one of our easier jobs, and called in a junior team. Then I went back to the office and pulled the Moorhead files.

The image of my mother’s kitchen chair, fresh from my dream, haunted me. We had approached the Moorhead scene with a single assumption: that the family had been slaughtered there in a ritualistic way, and the bodies had then been moved.

But what if there had been no ritual? What if this had been a crime of passion? Blood was everywhere in that house, except the kitchen, an oddity explained at the time by the ritualistic nature of the deaths.

I didn’t have crime-scene photos, but I did have my photos of the scene. It was the early days of my business; I did before-and-after photos for prospective clients.

The before photos were vicious and dark, grimmer than I remembered. But the blood spatter, the filth left from violent death, was much as my memory held it — a long, continuous spray, followed by real spatter, arcing as the blood pulsed from someone’s body.

In one photo, my hand pressed on the rug, releasing the blood contained within. In another, the rivulets of blood went down the stairs, drops alongside heading away from the scene.

What had the police tested? What had they ignored?

I thumbed through until I found the bathrooms. They, like the bedrooms, were thick with blood. The toilet, the bathtub, and the sinks had light spray, but nothing inside the porcelain basins, suggesting that no one had cleaned up there.

No one had cleaned in the kitchen either.

I stared at the images, trying to recall the lesson of the dream. Take away my expectations, and what did I see?

A charnel house.

A place where blood was allowed to flow freely and for some time.

I closed the file and leaned on it, my stomach as queasy as it had been the night before. I rubbed my eyes, sighed heavily, and picked up the phone.

I had a lot of contacts at the police department. Early on, they had considered me part of the brotherhood, mostly because of my EMT and fire training, and they handed out my cards to grieving widows and distraught adult children.

Over time, several officers would call me before the city did, letting me know I had a job on the way, and preparing me so that I could put the proper team on it. If the case was sensitive, I often did the work myself. That way, if I found overlooked or lost evidence, I knew that it would be handled correctly. Mostly, I would leave it alone, and place a call on my cell. The forensic teams would arrive quickly because, I’d learned, it was me. My assistants often didn’t get the same kind of respect.

Still, asking to see files in a case that had been closed for years was a sensitive thing. It irked all of us involved that we hadn’t found the bodies, but, we had consoled ourselves, we had found the killers. I had taken this case as personally as the detectives who had worked it, and we all confessed late one night in the local cop bar that this was the case that haunted us.

Detective Jeffrey Foreno was the only one who had ever expressed doubts about the case. He had openly questioned whether the cult had done the killings. After all, he said, no blood was found in their hidey hole. No knives, no black candles. And nothing suggested they had been on the property that night. It had all been supposition and circumstance, fear and small-town politics.

He had been shushed pretty quickly.

So he was the one I went to that morning.

He was approaching retirement. The lines in his face were deep and grooved, accented by the white stubble he’d forgotten to shave off before coming to work. The rest of his hair was black and thick, in need of a cut. His eyes, once sharp and alert, were bloodshot, and when he saw me, he sighed.

“I knew someone would want to resurrect the dead.” He leaned back in his chair, his hands folded over his stomach. “Just didn’t expect it to be you.”

I’d told him once I dreamed about cleaning the house, about the way the blood came back, as if the walls never wanted to give it up. He’d told me that he dreamed of the case too — of the Christmas tree that hadn’t existed even though the outside of the house had been exquisitely decorated, of the lack of food in the kitchen, of the empty pet bowls, cleaned and stored in a dusty pantry.

“Why did you think someone would bring up the case?” I asked, sitting across from him.

He gave me one of those sideways looks that always made me nervous. Even with bloodshot eyes, Jeffrey Foreno had a way of looking all the way to your soul.

“The party,” I said.

He pointed at me, which, in Jeff language, meant You got it in one.

“How come you didn’t go?” I asked.

“It felt like dancing on someone’s grave.” Then he gave me that look again and his lips thinned. “You went.”

I nodded. “Figured I had to. It had been my job to make sure no one noticed what had happened there.”

He didn’t move, nor did his expression change. “Did it work?”

I shrugged. “I think Louise was using the murders to give the place ambience.”

“The power of rubbernecking,” he said.

“Yeah.” I wouldn’t have put it so crassly, but he was right. Maybe that was why I hadn’t gone upstairs, why I refused to look at the rooms where the police had assumed most of the killings had taken place. Downstairs, the tree, the presents, the food, masked the prurience that went into the planning. Upstairs, the unvarnished truth — the naked interest of people more fortunate than the dwellers of the Moorhead place — would have been readily apparent.

“Did it open old wounds?” he asked.

I shook my head quickly, not sure I wanted to examine my answer to that question too closely.

“So you just came today out of curiosity,” he said as if he didn’t believe it.

“I came because I saw someone.” I told him about the waiter, the way the man had looked at me, both at the party and at the courthouse.

Foreno shrugged. “Maybe he was one of the rubberneckers. Some people make certain murder cases into their hobby.”

“I know,” I said. “But sometimes there’s more to it.”

He frowned at me.

“Remember anyone involved in the case who looked like that?”

“Like a perfect World War Two German? Can’t say as I do.”

Put that way, I wouldn’t have recognized him either. “I’d like to look through the file.”

“Be my guest,” Foreno said. “It’s not going to bother anyone. Unless you find something.”

We grinned at each other. Then he led me to Records, got me the case files, and signed off so that I could work.

The Moorhead file took up five boxes, most of them police and evidence reports. I gave the evidence reports a cursory glance, and saw exactly what I suspected: The assumptions began with the murder of the family and went from there. Most of the blood evidence was scraped from the wall of the bedroom — the crime-scene tech’s reasoning was simple: He didn’t want to deal with the inevitable carpet fibers in the blood pool. Although, to his credit, he did cut carpet swatches as well, and stored them in one of the refrigeration units at the crime lab. Unless someone needed the space, the evidence might still be there.

I searched through the boxes until I found what I was looking for. Pictures. Not of the house, but of the family.

Five members — husband, wife, three children, the oldest being fifteen, the youngest twelve. Speculation by the investigating officer was that one or all of the children had had contact with the cult.

I stared at the father. His face was bony and Aryan too, almost but not quite the same as the waiter I had seen. The eldest son, fourteen, looked like his father or might have if he’d lived. That heavy bone structure was unusual, at least in these parts. I thumbed through the documents to see if there were other family members in the vicinity.

No one had located any. Pages and pages of police interviews, with neighbors, coworkers, friends, did not include anyone from the family.

Then I looked at the mug shots of the cult members. I remembered those faces from the trial as well. Young, confused, ravaged, they made me wonder whether those kids were vulnerable because they were following the wrong leader or whether they had followed the wrong leader because they were vulnerable.

I closed the boxes, feeling more uncertain than I had before I started. I put them back, and went upstairs to say goodbye to Foreno.

“Find anything?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Let it rest.” Then he gave me that look. “You’re not going to, are you?”

“Who inherited the house?” I asked.

“No one,” he said. “The state ended up with it.”

“No family,” I said.

“None that we could find.” He tapped a pen against the top of his desk. “And before you ask, let me tell you I remember this because it seemed so damn odd. Two middle-aged parents with no family at all. No one remembered any grandparents or aunts and uncles visiting the kids. These people were an island.”

“Their money went to the state, too?”

“Eventually,” he said. “Not that there was much of it.”

“In a house like that?”

“Mortgaged and credit cards. The furniture wasn’t even worth anything. The appearance of money, but no real money.”

“Don’t you find that strange?”

“Always have,” he said.

“The guy I saw,” I said, “looks a lot like the father.”

Foreno cursed, then leaned back in his chair. “You sure?”

“It’s not him,” I said. “There’re differences.”

“Family differences?”

“I’d’ve thought they were brothers or cousins,” I said.

Foreno frowned. Then he reached to the left and opened his bottom desk drawer. From my vantage, standing, I could see a dozen accordion files, all filled with manila folders. He thumbed through the files, then pulled out one folder.

He slid it to me, and stood.

“You want some lunch?” he asked. “I’m buying.”

I looked at him with surprise.

He nodded toward a chair in the corner. “It’ll take you awhile to go through that.”

“A sandwich would be nice,” I said.

He grabbed his suit coat, then headed out the door. As he left, he pulled the door closed, so that someone passing by wouldn’t be able to see me.

I found that curious, but not as curious as the file. It was thick with newspaper clippings and computer printouts, some more than a decade old.

Cult killings, ritual murders, and bodiless cases. This was Foreno’s comparison file. He was right: It took me quite a bit of time to read it. He managed to return with the sandwiches and we ate in silence while I read about beheadings and disembowlings, about corpses left in pieces all over property, about candles and black magic and pagan ceremonies.

In each, the bodies remained.

“You don’t think they did it,” I said as I tossed my sandwich wrapper into the nearby trash.

“The cult?” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“But the evidence points to them.”

“Rather neatly,” he said.

“So why didn’t you speak up?”

“Because I had no other theory of the case,” he said.

“Do you now?” I asked.

“Does your friend work for the catering firm?” And I realized he meant the man with the angular face.

“I think so.”

“I’ll see if I can track him down.”

“And if you do?”

Foreno shrugged. “I’ll see what happens next.”

I went back to work, thinking about all that blood, all those trails. The carpets were saturated, yet there were no footprints on the hardwood floors, no evidence of someone leaving through the front or back doors. The floors had been well-scrubbed with bleach, and one of the things I testified about was the way that bleach hid all evidence, one of the few things that masked even the goriest scene.

Why, the defense attorney had wanted to know, would someone remove the footprints, but leave the blood droplets? Why leave the drag marks on the carpet uncleaned?

I had shrugged. People aren’t that thorough. They clean only what they believe needs cleaning.

Blood is blood, isn’t it? he had asked, implying that someone who cleaned footprints on the hardwood would clean it all.

It’s not that simple, I said. I’ve had employees who missed spatter on their first few jobs because the scene was too overwhelming.

Do you think the killer would be overwhelmed? the defense attorney had asked, but the prosecutor had objected to the question. I never got to answer.

Would the killer have been overwhelmed? I considered the question now, at the safety of my desk. Probably not. After all, he created the scene.

Three saturated carpets. Five dead humans. Six quarts of blood per body. That house was soaked, the scene an example — the prosecutor had said — of overkill.

We see what we want to see.

I went back to my notes and, for the first time, did the math.

There was too much blood. None of us had realized it. At least twice the amount that should have been in that house. Twice the deaths? Or had someone taken buckets of blood and poured it on the carpets, letting the liquid soak in after he had expertly sprayed the walls.

Reproducing crime scenes wasn’t hard. Hollywood did it all the time, and there were photos of other scenes everywhere from forensic journals to true-crime novels. Spatter and spray would be easy to reproduce — plant misters, set just right, would mimic the early parts of spray, and something with a bit of kick would be able to reproduce the way that blood spurted from an artery.

There’d be mistakes, but who would look for them? Especially in an overwhelming and fairly obvious scene.

Too much blood wasn’t enough for Foreno to reopen the case — it was a closed murder trial, after all. But the blood evidence, coupled with the young man I’d seen, was enough to get Foreno working it again, on the side, in his spare time.

First, he had a crime-scene friend reexamine the photos, not explaining anything about the case.

Second, he looked in the Moorhead family background.

Third, he searched for the waiter.

And those three things came together into something both expected and unexpected. The tech said the scene might’ve been tampered with. Impossible to know now, although the blood was suspicious. Maybe someone else died.

The Moorheads traveled. They were running from debt in Michigan and used charm as well as the cosignature of an old friend to secure the house, which then got them credit cards and a new future.

Until the bank was ready to foreclose. Until the credit-card companies had cut them off.

And the cosigner? The same man who had waited tables that night. The one who had watched the court case. He was living under an alias, one he’d established twenty years before after he had embezzled fifty thousand dollars from a bank in the Midwest.

The bank where his brother had once worked.

The waiter wouldn’t talk to the police — hiring a lawyer immediately — but his presence was enough to get those carpet samples tested.

Still refrigerated, still intact after all these years. Sometimes laziness was its own reward.

And that, Foreno said when he came to my office in May, was when it got interesting. The blood was all the same type — O positive — but that was all it had in common. DNA testing proved that the blood came from dozens of sources, none of them related to the so-called victims.

Just the blood on the wall came from the family and, judging by the overlap in one of the bedrooms, had been applied just like I mentioned, with a sprayer and a lot of determination.

“Why?” I asked. “Why not just disappear? These people were smart enough to create new identities once before.”

And that was when he showed me the police files. He’d actually made copies for me so that I could look at them.

Pages and pages and pages of complaints filed by the family about the neighbors, about the young people in the house at the foot of the hill, about the parties and the goings-on, about the fears of devil worship and a possible cult.

Foreno shook his head. “Looks to me like pure old-fashioned hatred.”

“For their neighbors?”

“Their young, unusual, and loud neighbors,” Foreno said.

“They set these kids up?” I asked, and felt a shock at myself. I was willing to believe that a cult could kill an entire family; I was not willing to believe that a family would set up innocent people in a way that might send them to jail for life.

“Looks like it,” he said. “We’ve got work to do. They’ve got ten years and a lot of thinking on us.”

“But you’ll find them,” I said.

“I hope so,” he said. “But in life, there are no guarantees.”

Except one.

The story leaked, and the leak coincided with the release of the annual budget. The party, the plans for the museum, and the cost to the taxpayer made page one of our usually sleepy rag.

For a while, it looked like Louise might implode because of the scandal. Then she hit on the right note: The case wouldn’t be reopened — innocent people wouldn’t be getting out of jail — if she hadn’t been interested in the house in the first place.

She had a point, one I didn’t care to think about.

Then one afternoon shortly after Halloween I had to go to the Moorhead house for the final time.

I went with various attorneys — the D.A., several assistants, and defense attorneys for a variety of clients from the waiter to the cult. Someone had found the youngest son in Miami, but he hadn’t given up the rest of his family. His very presence — alive — in another state was enough to place doubt on the entire cult-killings story.

He wasn’t represented by an attorney, so far as I knew, but I didn’t ask a lot of questions.

Instead, I answered them, explaining what chemicals I had used, defending myself and why I hadn’t noticed the irregularities in the spatter, the extra blood, the lack of footprints.

Over and over again, I said simply that it wasn’t my job.

And it wasn’t. I was supposed to clean, not think. I was supposed to make the place livable again, and I had.

I had done everything I’d contracted to do.

Maybe that was why the house had haunted me so. Why I had dreamed of it, why the blood kept reappearing on the walls — not as if it couldn’t be buried, but as if there was too much of it to contain.

My subconscious had known.

My conscious mind had refused to accept anything but what it had been told: A family had been murdered by their neighbors, a murderous cult, and the bodies hidden.

Differing interpretations of the same evidence, evidence not examined closely by any of us.

Except the brother, who had made two mistakes. First, he had come to the trial — nervously and obsessively worrying — to see if anyone had found the planted evidence. Or maybe he was stunned and appalled that a case with no bodies generated enough evidence for a conviction. Maybe the family had merely meant to harass the cult, not destroy their lives.

Then he had come back to the house, deliberately getting hired, just so he could see the site of his — and his family’s — triumph. Or maybe he had still been worried, still afraid that he would get caught. Maybe he was guarding the place, hoping that no one figured it out.

Or maybe he simply couldn’t stay away.

Like I couldn’t.

I take evidence of a hideous event and make it vanish. I call that healing, but really, it’s just masking. The event remains. It is history; it has happened. I allow people to pretend everything is all right.

What happened in the Moorhead house that day was the opposite of what I do. That family had used a masking technique to get revenge on people they hated, and in the process, managed to disappear with no consequences at all. They left debts, and dozens of families in ruins.

They left a chair pushed out, and knew that we would assume the worst.

We prosecuted based on that assumption, and received a conviction. And I cleaned up the mess so thoroughly that we have to use photographs and cut pieces of rug, miraculously saved. We can’t revisit the scene with Luminol, trying to see what had happened before, because I smeared it trying to make the home safe, trying to make it — and us — forget.

We’ll never know for certain what happened in that house. Just like we’ll never know why another neighbor down the street finished his pie last Thanksgiving and then took his own life.

Just like I’ll never know how long my mother lay on the floor of her kitchen, conscious and hoping someone would find her.

We can clean the mess, but the uncertainties remain.

There are Christmas lights around the Moorhead house this year, but there will be no party. It’s not in the budget. Once the appeals are over, once the trials have ended, the house will become a museum, just like Louise dreamed.

But people aren’t going to go inside to look at one of the city’s first houses, thinking about old Josiah Moorhead and the power he had because he had the foresight to build ferries that crossed the river. People will go into his house to see if they can find that one piece of evidence, that one spot of blood, that one thing I might have missed in my thorough cleaning, hoping to see if they can solve the case that nearly cost a group of rowdy and unconventional young people their lives.

I won’t go back. I’m not going into any damaged houses anymore. I’m strictly management now — assigning teams, paying bills. I can’t look at interiors filled with the leftovers of other people’s lives and worry that something important has been missed.

I don’t want that responsibility.

My imagination is too strong, my memories too fresh.

I don’t need any more ghosts.

I have enough already.