Red House Blues (2 page)

Strange things pop into your head when your
life crashes full throttle into a wall. As the homicide detectives
sat in her tiny living room telling her that her worst fears hadn’t
been nearly bad enough, what bothered her most was that all she had
to offer them was instant coffee and some stale Fig Newtons.

Paula and Keith, as they asked Suzan to call
them, murmured their condolences and posed their questions, both as
standard issue as their tactfully concealed firearms. When was the
last time she saw her husband? Had he contacted her since he left
Bellingham? Had she known he was in Seattle? Did she know any of
his friends there? Paula did most of the talking. They had probably
decided on the drive up I-5 that this matter needed a woman’s
touch.

“Your husband didn’t have identification on
him, Mrs. Pike,” said Paula, once Suzan had identified Sean from
photos she felt would haunt her nightmares forever.

“Suzan - please call me Suzan.” She suddenly
realized she was no longer Mrs. Pike. Who was she now? A widow.
What did she know about being a widow? She wasn’t even thirty
yet.

“Suzan,” said Paula. “Mr. Pike’s prints
pulled up a Bellingham criminal record, which was how we got his
name. With the record was a missing persons report you filed. Could
you tell us about that, please?”

“The missing persons report? I’m surprised
the police kept that,” she said. “They told me they couldn’t help
me. He technically wasn’t a missing person since he left
voluntarily.” Suzan poured Paula some weak coffee. “He came home
the day he got out of rehab, packed some things in a gym bag and
left. Just like that.”

“He didn’t indicate where he was going?”

“No. I thought it would blow over. That he
would be back when he cooled down or that he would at least let me
know where he was staying so I could send mail. After a week I
still hadn’t heard anything from him so I called his friend Tony,
then Sean’s dad in Oak Harbor but they hadn’t heard from him
either.”

Suzan left out the part about wandering the
neighborhood like a lost soul, and crying all night, every night.
Paula’s soft voice and sad eyes told her she was already a pitiful
specimen without any added embellishment.

“I checked the hospitals and the police,”
she said. “That’s when I reported him missing. The police told me
he’d probably show up sooner or later. But I was afraid for
him.”

“Why was that? Did you think your husband
was suicidal?”

“I didn’t know. Anything could have
happened,” she said, while thinking yes, of course I thought he
might . . . and if he had killed himself it would have been my
fault.

“He’d been acting weird for a while. I
didn’t know what was going on with him. It scared me.”

“He was violent toward you, Suzan?”

The question came as a surprise. Sean?
Violent? The thought was so foreign.

“No! Of course not. He was furious with me
but he would never have hurt me.”

“But he was angry, you say. So, he left
because he was angry with you? It might help if we understood why
he left. Why was he angry?”

How to tell these strangers what she had
done? Suzan wished she could go back in time and choose a different
path but some things can never be undone. It had been her fault
Sean left her; she knew that with a keen certainty. Maybe
ultimately it had been her fault he died. What did she know?

“It’s complicated.”

“I’m sure it must be,” said Paula. “Still,
if we understood why he went to Seattle . . .”

“I don’t have any idea why he went to
Seattle. As far as I know he didn’t know anyone there,” said Suzan.
“But if I tell you a little about him . . . about us. Maybe that
will help you, maybe not. We met in junior high when my family
moved to Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island. Dad was stationed there with
the Navy. Sean was the first person who talked to me when I started
school there. He made friends with everyone.” She realized she was
babbling. “I’m sorry, you aren’t interested in all that.”

Paula leaned forward. “That’s okay, Suzan, I
know this is hard for you. Just take your time. There’s no telling
what will help.”

Suzan realized she’d been holding her
breath. She exhaled, asking her shoulders to relax away from her
ears.

“Sean sang and played guitar with a band
even then, literally a garage band. Just a bunch of kids jamming in
his friend Tony’s garage. I think Sean was the only one who took it
seriously,” she said. “Sean and I dated through high school, then
when we decided to go to college together here in Bellingham we got
married. It seemed like a great idea at the time. Romantic,
impulsive. You know how it goes.”

“Suzan, you said that the year before he
left, Sean’s behavior changed. In what way did it change?” asked
Paula.

“I didn’t notice anything at first. Sean was
working on a combined major in writing and music on full
scholarship. He was also playing in a band on weekends to help pay
for school. I know he was tired,” she said. “I know it sounds . . .
well, strange but we didn’t see a lot of each other. I was up to my
ears in my own work. I was wrapping up my junior year in art and
starting to think about grad school so I was on campus a lot.”

“Was this when he started using drugs?”

“I guess so. I don’t really know,” she said.
“I suppose I should have seen it. There must have been signs but I
wasn’t around very much. No, I guess I didn’t want to know anything
was wrong.”

Suzan took a sip of cold coffee.

“
I came home one afternoon
looking for notes I needed for Gothic Architecture and I found the
drugs. Later it occurred to me he wanted me to find them . . .
anyway, I just lost it. It was as if someone kicked me in the
stomach. I called the police and they sent an officer over to talk
to me. It was Sean’s bad luck that she was still here when he came
home. He went ballistic, shouting at me, out of control. The
officer searched him and found a bag in his pocket. That was it.
She cuffed him and read him his rights.”

The officer named Keith joined the
conversation for the first time. “We saw that the judge only gave
him ninety days in rehab, as he had no priors. Could be you saved
him from something worse down the line, Mrs. Pike.”

Suzan could see in his eyes he realized what
he said almost as soon as he said it. There had been no “down the
line”, no future for Sean. Sean was dead.

“You said he left the day he got out of
rehab?” said Paula.

“Yes. Sean said I betrayed him. Those were
his words. I betrayed him. He didn’t know me anymore. Didn’t want
to know me. Then he was gone,” she said. “I didn’t even try to
explain or stop him. I agreed with everything he said about me. I
still regret what I did. When I found the drugs I should have
waited for him to come home, should have sat him down and talked to
him. We might have been able to work through it. I didn’t give him
a chance.”

Only then did the threat of tears sting the
back of her eyes. The magnitude of what she had done to their
marriage rushed over her like tsunami.

“I’m sure you did what you thought was
right,” said Keith

“Can you think of anyone else we should talk
to, Suzan? You spoke of his friend . . . did you say his name was
Tony?” asked Paula.

“Tony Gabriola. I can get you his number but
I can’t imagine what he would have to add. He didn’t know where
Sean went either. He’s going to be devastated when he hears what
happened.” Oh please, thought Suzan, don’t let it be me who has to
tell Tony!

There wasn’t much else
anyone could say. The detectives sipped their coffee and tried to
convince her she had done the right thing but Suzan’s thoughts
drifted in and out of focus. How had it all fallen apart? They had
been so in love. Or so it had seemed.
No,
Sean loved me once, I’m sure of it. There is not a doubt in my
mind. I am the person I have doubts about.

“How did he die?” she asked at last, because
she thought it was expected of her. “You said it was a hit and run
but you’re from homicide. That means someone did this to him on
purpose. Are you sure it wasn’t an accident?”

Keith shifted in his chair. “Evidence
suggests that the driver of the car deliberately veered onto the
sidewalk to strike your husband, Mrs. Pike. Suzan. His housemates
say they were all together that night at a concert that ended
around two. They say your husband decided to walk home from there.
We think he was struck around two-thirty, quarter to three.”

“Someone ran him down on a sidewalk? He
wasn’t crossing the street?”

“That’s right. He was only a block from
where he was living.”

Living. Her stomach lurched. The two police
officers went on to relate more about the case, though not all they
knew of course, just what they felt she needed to know. Little of
it actually registered.

Suzan later could not remember walking the
detectives to the door. Was there someone they could call to be
with her, they asked. She didn’t think so. She had had nearly two
years to get used to the idea that Sean was gone, that he would
never come back. Why was everything suddenly so much more final
now? She couldn’t understand it, how numb she felt staring at the
closed door. The police had said what they had come to say then
they were gone back to Seattle, that mysterious place where her
husband lived his last two years with strangers. A house on Fir
Street in the heart of the city, they had said. It meant
nothing.

She picked up the coffee cups and took them
to the sink. The detectives hadn’t touched the Fig Newtons and she
couldn’t blame them. The cookies had gone as hard as ceramic tile.
She slid them into the garbage can under the sink and the plate
into an already overflowing dishpan.

It occurred to her she should call her
friend Claire after all. Tell her Sean was dead. Really dead. Maybe
Claire would come over and keep her company for a while. But she
was probably at work and Tony might answer the phone. She didn’t
know what she would say to Tony. She couldn’t talk to him yet.

I might cry. What’s worse, I might not.
Later, when I understand how this thing happened to us. When I can
feel something again.

There was nothing left now, she thought, but
to bury her husband, do the dishes, take out the garbage. She sank
into a chair and did nothing at all as the afternoon drifted away
like smoke on a breeze.

In the end she took the coward’s way out,
called Claire at the coffee shop and had her tell Tony before he
learned from a chance story on the internet that his childhood
friend was run down like a dog on the streets of the big city.
Suzan felt like crap about it, but then she already felt like crap
about life in general. Why shouldn’t Tony share some of the
misery?

Chapter 2

In the weeks following Sean’s funeral Suzan
painted three more watercolors in a series she was working on that
term. Not one of them pleased her. They were conventional,
lack-luster. She was going through the motions. Life tears you up
and spits you out, she thought, and still the day-to-day machinery
chugs along. She was in the studio late most nights, sometimes
getting shooed out by security. Her advisor assigned a still life
to “round out the portfolio”.

“I know you’ve done a million of these in
drawing class over the years,” he said. “What I’d like you to do
this time is stretch yourself. I want you to do a subject you
didn’t select but approach it with your own individual style. Make
it your own. I don’t want depiction. I want to see what goes on at
a gut level between you and the subject.”

Suzan hadn’t told Professor Evanson about
her husband. She didn’t want to endure the same kind of ignorant
sympathy people served up when he had left her two years before.
Life goes on. At least she hoped that was true.

It was business as usual on campus as autumn
quarter progressed. Red and gold leaves skittered across the brick
walks as she trudged between classes. Freshmen didn’t look nearly
as lost as they had the previous month. And her advisor was nagging
her to get her grad school applications out, put the portfolio on
disks, and send it around. He had the illusion she cared. In
reality Suzan was having doubts about grad school. It didn’t make
much sense anymore considering that after paying her share of the
funeral she would need another scholarship and a loan or hit a big
win in Lotto if she were to make it to grad school. And after grad
school, what? She didn’t need a degree to paint and teaching didn’t
appeal to her. She would have to get a job if she was to keep the
apartment and manage the bills. Claire would give her a job at the
coffee shop if things got dire.

She didn’t want to think any farther ahead
than tomorrow’s breakfast. Nothing was keeping her in Bellingham
now that she wasn’t waiting for Sean to return. She could apply
anywhere, go anywhere. The knowledge that he was never coming home
should have freed her from uncertainty. But free wasn’t what she
felt. The weeks remaining in the quarter flowed away, so much pale
water. Suzan somehow completed requirements without caring much
what the outcome would be.

Months went by and Suzan
didn’t hear another word from Seattle P.D. Sean’s case had gone as
cold as Kirk Cobain. He was nothing but pocket change and Jockey
shorts sealed in bags in a cardboard evidence box. Have to stop
thinking about it, she told herself.
They’ll get the creep eventually. But what if they don’t?
What if it was just an impulse killing? Someone getting off on the
excitement of picking off some poor pedestrian in the night. Maybe
the guy was drunk and doesn’t even remember doing it. What if he
never suffers for his crime? What happens to me? How do I set it
aside and continue?
Questions with no
answers.