Snow Creek(53)

“I am the police,” I say. “Just following up on the Burbank case.”

She opens the gate and comes over to me. She’s in her fifties, with a slim build with brown hair cut in the ubiquitous Seattle bob. She’s wearing pale green garden gloves and carrying a small trowel.

“Let me see your ID,” she demands, her lips tight and her brown eyes looking me over as if I were a danger to the community.

I tell her who I am and show my detective’s shield.

“Okay, fine,” she sniffs. “We’ve had nothing but trouble around here when they went missing. People coming and going.”

Her name is Chantelle Potter. She’s lived in the neighborhood for ten years.

“Carrie and I were pretty good friends for the first few years. Hudson was kind of a loner, but he managed to make it to the annual block party. Nice people. A little different.”

We sit on a bench.

“Define different,” I ask.

She glances back at the house, her eyes landing for a split second on the upstairs window.

“Ellie,” she finally says. “I felt sorry for that girl. She went from being part of the playgroup around here to being nearly invisible. We hardly ever saw her until the last couple of years.”

I’m not sure what she’s getting at and I say so.

“Detective,” she looks right at me, “I can’t explain it.”

“Try.”

Chantelle takes a deep breath. “I saw Ellie in the yard one night and she was talking to someone on her phone. I couldn’t help but overhear.” She stops a moment and looks at me. “I’m not the eavesdropper type. Ask anyone.”

That meant, of course, she was the eavesdropper type. My favorite type, actually, when it comes to investigating a crime. People who mind their own business, bad. People who take in every drama around them, good.

“Of course not,” I say as convincingly as possible. “What did you hear?”

“She was crying. Saying that she couldn’t wait to get out of the house and go to college. Her parents were riding her all the time. That kind of thing. She said her situation was worse than that of whoever was on the other end of the phone.”

It sounded like the kind of conversation a million or more teenagers are having at this very moment.

She goes on. “And then Hudson came out and started barking at her, telling her to get her butt into the house and to give up her goddamn phone. She threw it over into the bushes in my yard. He came over and grabbed her by the arm. It was hard, but I didn’t think it was hard enough to be abuse or I would have called you people.”

She looks over at me.

“Do you think I should have called?”

What’s done is done, I think.

“No,” I say. “You were using your best judgement. I can see that you are second-guessing yourself now. There’s no need for that, Ms. Potter.”

She gives me a look of appreciation.

An eavesdropper with a conscience, better than mere good.

“What was Carrie like?” I ask.

“Sweet. Passive. Actually, she became even submissive as the years went by. We used to have a glass of wine every now and then. One time she came over and said she’d prefer mineral water. The second time she did that I asked if she was pregnant or maybe had been drinking too much and wanted to cut back.”

“What did she say?”

“Get this. She said she stopped drinking because Hudson said so.”

I bristle inside, but don’t show it. “Like forbid it?”

“Exactly. Her words were, ‘Hudson said that I shouldn’t debase my body with wine anymore. He’s the leader of our family’.”

Leader? She sees disdain in my eyes.

Damn. She stops talking, like she’s said too much.

I encourage her to continue. “What did you make of that?”

“First,” Chantelle says, “I thought that I didn’t even know this girl anymore. I knew that they homeschooled Ellie and that they went to a fundamentalist church somewhere on the eastside. Second, I felt sorry for her. I wanted to say something, ask her how she really felt. I just couldn’t go there. I knew that my asking her anything would only make things worse.”

“Do you know anything about the Whitcombs?”

“Do I know Troy and Tyra are liars? Yes.”

“What do you mean, liars?”

“I saw Susan Whitcomb two weeks ago.”

I’m confused. And I look it.

“She didn’t die in any accident. Her husband and daughter made that up after she’d been discovered having an affair. I don’t know why they made up the story. Sympathy for the two of them, I guess. Joy in getting rid of her. She went along with it. Susan’s like that. Weak. I’d have taken him for everything he had.”

“I’m actually stunned,” I admit. “Now I know why there hasn’t been anything filed about her death. Nothing in the papers either.”

“Right. To hear those two talk about it they couldn’t be happier if she actually were dead.”

We talk some more. I look at my phone. I ask her if we can speak again and she gives me her number.

“Detective,” she says as I turn to leave, “I wish I could tell you more, but really…” She looks over at the fence that separates her house from the Burbank place. “After Hudson became the leader, or whatever, of the family, we no longer needed a fence. He’d fashioned an invisible forcefield between all of us.”