No One Needs to Know (26 page)

The trespassing got so bad that the Seattle Police put a patrol car on guard duty in the turnaround outside the house. Stories emerged from the cops that they’d seen and heard someone walking around inside the mansion when no one was really there. One officer, who refused to perform guard duty again, said he could hear what sounded like a baby crying inside the house. Another cop claimed the swing set in the backyard would go back and forth on its own, when there was no wind at all.

Laurie wasn’t sure how much of this was truth or urban legend. The stories were hard to substantiate.

In 1977, the owner in Brentwood finally sold the Gayler Court property to a Phoenix millionaire named Conrad Ellison. He restored the place to its original opulence and amped up security. Ellison made it into his summer retreat, and according to a friend, he held séances there every July 7. By 2002, he was bedridden and died peacefully in his sleep at age eighty-six. His bedroom was the one Elaina and Dirk had occupied on the last night of their lives. Ellison willed the place to his nephew under the proviso that it not be torn down. Apparently, the nephew was given an allowance to maintain the estate.

But from the recent photos Laurie saw online, she figured the maintenance money must have been spent somewhere else. The mansion had looked terribly neglected, even sinister. Then again, whoever posted the article online had probably wanted to create an impression that the place was indeed haunted. Under the comments section, someone wrote:

3/19/14, from Brad Reece, Seattle:

Good article! Last month, an unidentified homeless man was found inside the house (the living room, I think) with his throat slit. They said he’d been sleeping there for a while. As far as I know, the police are still investigating it. Sounds kind of strange to me. We don’t get too many homeless people in that part of Magnolia. Anyway, the haunting continues. I wouldn’t spend the night in that place for a million dollars.

The “murder house” didn’t look quite as ominous now, with two big trucks parked outside, the lights blazing inside, and several technicians moving around. Still, there was a sort of somber quiet among the workers. And the morning mist gave the place an otherworldly glow.

Along with the dull rain, a night chill lingered in the air as Laurie helped Cheryl unload the boxes of pastries and baked goods from the minivan. Even when she saw the crew setting up lights and power batteries on the living room floor, Laurie still felt ill at ease crossing the threshold into the foyer. She thought of the violent murders in that room, and remembered the photo she’d glimpsed of Elaina—with the stab wounds in her back and her head completely turned around.

Laurie glanced up at the railing at the top of the curved staircase, and imagined the troubled UW student who had hung himself from there.

“The kitchen’s thataway!” one of the technicians called to her. He pointed to a corridor on the other side of the stairs. “Need any help?”

“We sure do!” Cheryl replied, a little out of breath. “If you’ll carry in one of the coffee urns, I’ll see you get the first cup. Do the outlets work in there?”

“Tested and approved,” he replied, brushing past them as he headed outside.

Laurie followed her into the kitchen. The house was drafty, with a musty smell—probably from being closed up for so long. She figured Conrad Ellison must not have been completely faithful to the original design when he’d had the place restored. The kitchen looked more like 1990s than the late sixties. The cabinets were a natural dark wood, and all the appliances were white. They must have worked, too, because she could hear the refrigerator humming. Laurie noticed two separate alcoves off the kitchen: one was a back stairwell and the other was a short hallway toward the back door. It looked like someone had given the place a thorough cleaning.

“I think this is a good place for the pastries,” Cheryl said, setting two boxes on the counter. She still seemed to be out of breath. “We—we’ll just leave everything in the boxes and put out plenty of napkins . . .”

As Laurie set down her two boxes, she noticed Cheryl—with a hand on her heart—glancing around the kitchen. She seemed to focus on the window by a built-in breakfast booth. Laurie wondered if that was the window the killers had used to enter the house that night exactly forty-four years ago.

She looked at Cheryl, whose face had turned white as chalk. “Are you okay?” Laurie asked.

She sighed. “I don’t think I got enough sleep last night. I—”

A sudden, loud clatter interrupted her.

Startled, Laurie almost jumped out of her skin. She swiveled around and saw the technician in the kitchen entryway, holding one coffee urn. He’d dropped a second one.

The stainless steel urn rolled back and forth on the floor. The lid had flown off, and the pieces inside had spilled out.

Laurie caught her breath. “My God, you stopped my heart!” she laughed.

But then she turned to Cheryl, who had tears in her eyes. She held a hand over her mouth. She looked as if she were about to be sick.

“Cheryl?” she whispered.

She just shook her head and ran toward a little hallway off the kitchen. Laurie trailed after her, but Cheryl ducked into a bathroom. She slammed the door shut.

“Jesus, I’m really sorry,” she heard the technician say. “I didn’t mean to scare you guys. I don’t think it’s broken . . .”

Laurie watched him set the one urn on the counter. Then he started to pick up the pieces to the second one.

“It’s okay,” she said. She went to help him, but hesitated and glanced back at the bathroom door. Cheryl probably needed her help more.

Laurie wondered what was wrong with her. But she couldn’t help being more concerned about something else.

How in the world had Cheryl known where the bathroom was?

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

Monday, July 7, 11:08
A.M.

A
dam heard the tires screech as he took another curve along Lake Washington Boulevard. He realized he was going forty-five miles per hour, fifteen miles over the speed limit. He wiped the tears from his face and told himself to slow down. His poor dad had already lost one son and a daughter-in-law today. That was enough.

His father didn’t know about Dean and Joyce yet. As much as he dreaded telling him the news, Adam needed to be there when his dad found out.

The windshield wipers of his secondhand Mini Cooper whisked back and forth in the light rain. Adam eased up on the accelerator and maneuvered another curve in the winding, tree-lined road. He had the local news station on the radio—extra loud to keep him alert and focused. He was emotionally and physically exhausted. For the last seven hours, he’d been grilled by the police—first at the house, and then at the East Precinct on Capitol Hill.

Adam wasn’t too familiar with details of the Elaina Styles murder case, and he didn’t know anything about a film shooting in town. He’d never heard of the Hooper Anarchists. So when the police asked if he had any idea why his brother and sister-in-law had been chosen for these copycat murders, he didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Someone had to explain it to him. The police didn’t say anything, but Adam had a feeling they considered him a suspect—maybe even their only suspect. He answered their questions as candidly as possible, and tried not to get testy when they asked the same questions again and again. He did break down and cry a few times under the grilling.

They let him call Evergreen Manor shortly after eight o’clock this morning. He asked the doctor in charge to make sure no one told his dad the news. He also asked if they could please keep him away from the TV or radio. He pictured his poor widowed father, confused and devastated—without anyone there to comfort him. He’d been a “resident” there for four months, and he still considered the doctors and nurses strangers and the other patients as “old geezers and loony cases.” He was in the beginning stages of dementia. Shortly before Dean had moved him to Evergreen Manor, he’d fallen down the stairs at home and broken his leg. He was out of his cast, but still hobbled along with the help of a cane. Adam’s dad was only sixty-nine years old, but in the last year he’d aged terribly. Today’s news wasn’t going to help any.

A patrolman had driven Adam home and told him that his basement apartment was part of the crime scene. Adam found four squad cars parked in front of the house and about thirty onlookers in the street. To his surprise, there was only one TV news van—with a reporter and a cameraman beside it, sizing up the scene.

One of the cops by the front gate said he needed to clear it with one of them before he took anything out of his place. They’d already searched the Mini Cooper, and gave him the okay to take it and visit his dad. He told them he’d come back to pick up some of his things later.

He was still wearing the clothes he’d had on when he’d found Dean and Joyce on the living room floor. One glance at poor Joyce, and he’d seen she was dead. But he’d felt his brother’s neck and his wrist for a pulse. He’d sobbed on his brother’s shoulder once he’d verified that he was gone, too.

He wished like hell he and Dean hadn’t fought. The last thing he said to his big brother had been a jab about how Dean made their father uncomfortable during his rare visits to Evergreen Manor.

Dean and Joyce had indeed been footing the bill for the rest home, and it obviously wasn’t cheap. They had a top-notch professional staff, a cafeteria, a notions store, a gym, and a movie and game room. Since they catered mostly to the elderly, infirm, and early dementia patients, their security staff was always on the alert—not only for patients who might wander out of the building, but also for scam artists preying on the residents.

Evergreen Manor was about four blocks from University Village shopping mall. It was a sprawling, two-story redbrick building with white shutters. Except for a garden courtyard area, they didn’t offer the residents much in the way of outside diversions—except some benches by the entrance. In nice weather, at least a dozen of them would congregate out there—in their wheelchairs and with their walkers that had the tennis balls fitted on the bottom back tips. They’d be dressed in anything from their pajamas and robes to their Sunday churchgoing best. Adam knew a lot of them by name—even though his dad still didn’t.

As he pulled into Evergreen Manor’s parking lot, Adam cringed at the mob scene by the building’s front entrance. He pulled into a spot, shut off the Mini Cooper, and climbed out from behind the wheel. He watched a security guard arguing with one of the TV news van drivers. The poor guard was probably trying to get the driver to move out of the emergency zone. “Oh, shit,” Adam murmured, counting one, two, three—four TV cameramen. The old-timers in their usual spot, protected from the rain under the front entrance canopy, seemed to enjoy the excitement and attention.

Adam stood in the drizzling rain for a moment, and took it all in. Now he knew why there had been only one TV news van in front of Dean and Joyce’s house. The rest of them were here. They’d tracked down his poor, feeble dad, and wanted a statement from him.

His father had probably already been told that his older son and daughter-in-law were dead. Adam realized he was too late to be there and help cushion the blow for him.

With his arms crossed in front of him, he trotted toward Evergreen Manor’s entrance. He tried not to make eye contact with anyone. He hoped to keep moving fast enough so that no one would notice the blood on his shirt.

“That’s him!” said Dave, one of the residents. The old man in a cardigan and ugly golf pants was talking with a reporter near the entrance. “That’s the brother, Adam . . .”

All at once, Adam found himself face-to-face with a small, smartly dressed, nipped-and-tucked, seventy-something blonde with a mic in her hand. It took him a moment to recognize Dolly Ingersoll, the show business gossip maven. She had a cameraman at her side. “Adam!” she said. “Why do you think your brother and his wife were targeted by these copycat killers?”

He just shook his head in her direction and kept moving through the crowd to the front door.

“What do you think of the Elaina Styles movie they’re shooting here in town?” she called. “Do you think it prompted the murders?”

The other TV reporters zeroed in and fired questions at him, too. They were talking over one another when Adam ducked inside the building. He hurried to the front desk, and recognized the stout, copper-haired nurse on duty. She was around his father’s age. “Hi, Jodi,” he said, picking up the pen to sign the visitors’ book.

“Adam, I’m so sorry to hear about your brother and sister-in-law,” she murmured.

“Thank you.” He signed in, and then looked at her warily. “Does—does my dad know?”

She winced. “Yes, I’m afraid so. We were trying to keep a lid on it, but that was kind of tough with the three-ring circus going on outside. One of the other residents told him.”

Adam sighed. “Oh, God, how is he? Do you know?”

“He’s in his room. One of the therapists was in there with him a while ago.”

Adam thanked her and hurried down the corridor to his father’s room.

There were touches of home in the small unit, which had a hospital bed in the middle of it. Framed family photos adorned the dresser and nightstand—including his parents’ wedding portrait, and Dean and Joyce’s wedding photo. His father had insisted on having a couple of Adam’s paintings on the walls. There wasn’t enough room for his dad’s big screen TV, so he had to settle for a twenty-nine-inch model. But he’d managed to squeeze in his own Barcalounger from home. He sat there now, in a plaid shirt and navy blue pants that showed a bit of his white legs over the sock lines. He was still a good-looking man. His wavy white hair needed a trim, but it was carefully combed. He had the TV on mute, but was staring out the rain-beaded window at the garden.

There was no sign of the therapist. Adam couldn’t tell whether or not his dad was fully functioning right now. “Pop?” he said, stepping inside.