Portland Noir (5 page)

Henry and Julia. Henry and Julia.

I was early at the bike shop. Truth be told, I’d known I was setting out too early from home. This way I could kill some time at the library.

The downtown library branch was only a few blocks away. I locked up my bike and strolled over. The building was imposing, stone and red brick, tall and grand. I’d always been proud of Portland for having a place like this, even if I didn’t use it a lot myself. It made me feel like we were a real city, a real, important place.

The reference librarians sat behind a massive desk on the first floor. There were three people there now: an older woman, a middle-aged woman, and a cute guy with red hair and gold wire-rimmed glasses. I walked up to the desk, but before I could get the cute guy’s attention, the middle-aged lady glanced up at me.

“I’m looking for information on some people,” I blurted out. I was cracking my knuckles now, an old nervous habit, and the pops sounded crass to me in the silence of the room.

“Which people?” she asked. I realized how stupid my answer—
Henry and Julia
—would sound.

“Well, maybe a place would be better to start,” I said. “My house. I mean, the house I just bought, but the people who owned it before me. Us. Who used to live there.”

Maybe I should have told Josh what I was doing. Maybe he already knew. When I was a kid I’d been the one to touch the poison oak to see if it was really that bad; it was, but the physical itching still burned less than my curiosity had.

The woman took down my address and suggested a few places to start—county property and tax records, some property websites, even, she suggested, the
Oregonian
archives, our daily paper. “How far back do you want to go?” she asked.

“August 8, 1957,” I replied.

She nodded, as if unsurprised. “This could be tough. Those kinds of records can wind up all over the place.”

I thanked her, said goodbye, and headed off to work. Josh would already be in the city by now, I thought to myself. Josh and Allison. Not quite the same ring as Henry and Julia, but nice in its own way, I thought.

Over dinner that night, I told Josh what I’d done. “She said it might be hard, but possible. But that maybe I’d have to do some digging.”

Josh put down his fork with a sigh. He’d made apple-stuffed pork chops and baked potatoes; I usually dated guys who liked to cook, since, left to myself, I’d have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner every night. “Allison, we just got here. Can we maybe work on the house a bit first, maybe do some of the renovations and changes we talked about before you go flitting off into something else?”

I could feel my brow furrowing, and I tried to smooth it out. I know he hates it when I get, as he puts it, pouty; I wanted to make him happy. “But don’t you want to know who these people are? What the truth is? All that? I mean, maybe there’s Spanish doubloons buried in the backyard! How cool would that be?”

“Honey, we just got here, we have so much to do. Why waste your energy on this?” He was in sweats by now, though I still wore the same jeans and blouse as earlier in the day. Across his sweatshirt was written, in gold,
Minnesota
. My mom loved that he was a Midwest boy. I didn’t care either way. He grinned, his perfect teeth lined up like a picket fence. “And anyway, maybe Julia’s the one buried in the backyard.”

“My point exactly. Wouldn’t you want to know that?” I asked, pointing my fork at him. A tiny sliver of apple fell off the tines onto my plate. Josh reached out with his own fork, speared the apple slice, and popped it into his mouth. He didn’t speak until he’d swallowed it.

“No,” he answered. “I really wouldn’t.” He went back to his pork chop, and the sound of his chewing filled our small kitchen. Beneath the table, though, I felt his foot slide across to mine and rub the inside of my arch. His bare foot was warmer than my own, and I rubbed his foot back.

It took me three weeks of running back and forth among county agencies. One place had ownership records, but not on computer, so I had to go request the file in person. Henry Lewis, it turns out. The house was in his name alone, so I tried tracking down a marriage certificate for him—Julia Crosby, Julia Lewis after 1951. Henry had owned the house until only ten years ago, when someone had bought the place and moved in. Then it had been sold again, a year ago, renovated, and sold to us. So few people separated us from Henry and Julia.

There wasn’t much other information about them in the county files, no matter where I looked. Maybe they had simply led quiet, unassuming lives, I thought. Then I remembered what the librarian said, and checked the newspaper archives. The electronic records didn’t go back to the ’50s, only the ’80s, so I had to go to the paper in person. The
Oregonian’s
building sits at the south end of downtown. It looks like a holdover from the ’70s, from that moment in American architecture when all taste seemed to have left us as a nation. Plain and squat and industrial looking, and no better inside, where nothing seemed to be of any particular color.

But I found Henry Lewis in the records stored there. And I found Julia Lewis. She’d been killed by a burglar, the newspaper said at first, coshed on the head. She’d bled to death on her kitchen floor. My kitchen floor. Then: Husband arrested for murder of wife. Then, a few days later, a brief, brief story: Henry Lewis had been released. Police had nothing to say; they let him go. And Julia Lewis’s name disappeared from history. If they had known back then who killed her, the newspaper never mentioned it. If Henry Lewis had been guilty or innocent, they never said. Only that she was dead, and he was released.

“Let it go!” Josh yelled at me from the bathroom. “Just let it go! She’s dead fifty years, he’s probably dead somewhere too. Just let it go and forget about it!”

I’d been talking about Julia and Henry for the past month now, since I’d discovered her murder. She stayed on my mind. I’d put her photo on my nightstand. Every day, her face looked up at me when I groped for my glasses.

“You’re not Nancy Drew,” he said. He was in socks and pajama bottoms, standing in the hall outside our door, kitty-corner to the bathroom door. There was only one bathroom in the house so far, but we planned to change that, to put in a half bath, maybe a full bath. Our contractor said that would increase the house’s resale value.

“I’m not trying to be Nancy Drew,” I answered. I was in bed, sitting up, with the newspaper on my lap. We never had time to read the paper in the morning, when it was delivered. Who does these days, anyway? “I just want to know more about them.”

“You just think you can fix this,” he said. “Baby, it’s been fifty years. She’s so dead she’s not even a person anymore, just bones buried somewhere. And he’s probably dead or senile or moved on. Why can’t you just let it go?”

“Because!” I answered. “Because … I don’t know why. Except that I can’t. They lived in this house, in our house, and they did all the things we do, and Julia’s dead and Henry knows the truth. And I want to know the truth too.”

Josh ducked back into the bathroom. I heard him spitting out toothpaste, running the faucet. I turned off my bedside lamp and snuggled under the covers, closing my eyes. I was facing the wall. Maybe he would take the hint.

When he returned to the bedroom, he turned off the light and got into bed next to me. He reached over to hug me, and I felt the slight dampness on his face. He had strong arms. That was something I’d always liked about him, and I could feel his strength now when he put his arms around me. After the brief embrace, he reached over me, to my nightstand. He picked up the picture of Julia, brought it over to his side of the bed, and put it into a drawer in his nightstand. I heard him close the drawer. Then he turned back to me, buried his face in my hair, and took the night’s deep breath. I pressed my back into him, to feel him next to me. The way we curved together, like two cats asleep together.

“Let’s just sleep, okay?” he whispered. “We’ll wake up tomorrow and forget all this.”

Obviously I couldn’t tell Josh anything more, I decided. I left Julia’s picture in his nightstand. I didn’t even try to sneak it out when Josh wasn’t home, just in case he’d somehow know. That was all right, though; I’d looked at the picture enough to have it practically memorized. And now I knew they were Henry and Julia Lewis, I didn’t need the photo anyway. There were other ways to find Henry. Julia I didn’t need to find; I already knew where she was. The newspaper obit had been brief and to the point. Donations, please, to the ASPCA; service at St. George’s; buried in a cemetery not far from here. I kept meaning to go to her grave, but somehow I never found the time.

Henry, though, Henry was harder. He hadn’t owned a house in Portland, that I could tell, for at least a decade. He didn’t have a hunting or fishing or pilot’s license. He didn’t have any court records. He hadn’t gotten sued or tried to sue anyone. Not even a parking ticket! The librarians and court clerks were tired of me; I’d visited the
Oregonian
twice more; and I’d called the
St. Johns Sentinel
, as well as some of the other neighborhood papers. I was starting to think he was dead.

I was running almost every night now. I looked at each house I passed, wondering if he lived in any of them. I puffed schoolyard chants under my breath, with his name:
Henry and Julia, sitting in a tree … Mr. Henry had a steamboat …
Sometimes I chanted aloud, softly. The people I passed by looked at me oddly, but the chants helped me stay focused, helped me keep my pace up. At night I thought I saw her form standing at our kitchen counter, or ducking into the bathroom. Stupid, of course. The house had been renovated since she’d lived in it; the rooms probably weren’t even arranged in the same way as they were back then. My kitchen wasn’t her kitchen; it was and wasn’t the same house.

Sometimes, when I got very tired, I just used their names as a cadence, over and over.
Henry and Julia, Henry and Julia, Henry and Julia.
They had shared something, some burden. I wanted to be the one to lift it from them, to take it for them.

“I found a Henry Lewis,” Josh said one night at the dinner table. It was dark out, far darker than where we’d lived downtown, where the streetlights fuzzed out the stars. We were eating spaghetti with meatballs, one of the few recipes I could make well. Josh held a forkful of pasta up to his mouth, examined it for a second, and ate it.

“What?” I said. I almost spilled my wine on my T-shirt. “You found Henry? My Henry?”

Josh shook his head. He was wearing a T-Shirt emblazoned with
The Shins
, one of Portland’s favorite indie-rock bands. Personally, I hated them, but that’s not the kind of thing you could really say in Portland, where indie musicians who manage to chart are the closest thing to gods. I’d never told Josh how I felt about them.

Josh shrugged, chewing. After he swallowed, he spoke again. “I don’t know if it’s
your
Henry Lewis, but it’s a Henry Lewis. He’s about the right age, and he lives in St. Johns, so maybe it’s your guy.”

My eyes welled with tears. “How did you find him? I didn’t even know you were looking.” I felt overwhelmed to think we’d been searching for the same thing after all. It made me immensely grateful.

A shrug. “I didn’t so much find him as he fell into my lap,”

Josh replied. “When I was at Roosevelt High this week.”

I nodded. We’d both approved of his volunteer activities; it was like giving back—and coincidentally, I told myself, if it helped raised the high school’s test scores, it would also raise our property values.

“Well, one of the volunteer clubs there helped out Meals on Wheels for a few weeks. Some kind of senior project or something. And one of the guys getting delivered to is this Henry Lewis guy. Kid says he’s short, a little fat, definitely old. Never tips or makes cookies for the kids or anything. It’s just him, alone. So I got the kid to give me the address. They’re not supposed to, but I made up some bullshit story about reconciling the group’s gas expenditures and their status as a school group. Easy.”

Josh took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and slid it across the table to me.
Henry Lewis, 9911 N. Central
, in some kid’s messy blue-inked scrawl. It had been two months since we’d found the photograph and the note.

I got up from my chair and circled around the table to hug Josh. “Thank you,” I whispered into his ear. A strand of his hair got into my mouth, laying the taste of shampoo onto my tongue.

Henry Lewis lived alone, in a white bungalow less than a mile away. From the outside the houses looked similar; a lot of houses in St. Johns had been built off the same or only slightly modified plans. It had been the kind of neighborhood where people just wanted to own a house of their own, whether or not five others on their block were identical.

I felt like I was ten again, knocking on his door. I’d sold Girl Scout cookies back then, back when we still went door-to-door, our moms in the cars behind us. I knocked once and got no answer, so I knocked again, harder this time. “Mr. Lewis?” I called out. I was wearing gray slacks and a light sweater, pale pink, with short sleeves. Nice, nonthreatening, neutral.

Shuffling noises inside. The door opened with a creak, and he stood in the doorway. So this was Henry Lewis. He looked his age; his skin was lined and saggy, the wrinkles especially deep around his mouth. Most of his hair was gone, except for fringes of gray around the bottom of his head. He wore jeans and a faded red T-shirt and bright white sneakers, the kind that people who think walking in the mall is exercise wear.

I waited for him to say something. Nothing came.

“Mr. Lewis,” I started. “My name is Allison Priest, and my husband and I just moved into 9535 North Leonard.”

Nothing.

“Your old house?” I hated myself for making that a question, but it skipped out before I could stop it. “It was yours, right?”

He nodded.

“Well, I’m hoping I can ask you a few questions about Julia.” I pulled the photo out of my purse. “We found this in the walls. It’s Julia, isn’t it?”

No nod this time, he just motioned me in. The living room was in shade. Not dark, exactly, but with a certain yellow light, a bit dim. Henry Lewis sat down in a brown easy chair; the velour on the arms was faded. The way he sat, his gut protruded forward. I saw a cane in the corner, though he hadn’t carried it to the door. I stood for a moment, trying to adjust to the light. I sat down on a blue sofa, across from him. The cushions were firmer than I’d expected.