Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [12]
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