Page 80 of Snow Creek

Would like to see you. If you don’t answer, that’ll be your answer. Dan.

I pull over right away.

Would like to see you too.

Meeting some friends at Hops @7. Come.

Nervously, I push SEND. I don’t want to screw up my life by potentially ignoring anything that might be actually good for me. Next I text Mindy and tell her to meet me.

Safety in numbers.

She answers back right away and tells me to call her. So I do.

“I like him,” I say before Mindy says a word.

“I know you do, but it’s not about that, Megan. It’s about the Torrance case. Not something we’d want to bring up tonight. But wow.”

She is in full Mindy mode. I miss that. She is a consummate pro but couldn’t mask her sometimes gleeful interest in the macabre. She loves flowers and blood spatter with equal abandon. She wanted to name her shop Pushing Up Daisies though thought better of it.

“What have you got?” I ask.

She takes a deep breath and then unloads.

“The Torrance case is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. It’s reminiscent of the Carl Tanzler case out of Florida in the 1930s.”

Of course, Florida.

She goes on to tell me about the obsessive radiology assistant and how he preserved the body object of his affection, Elena Milagro de Hoyos.

“He kept her in his bed for seven years, like a dead sex slave.”

“Okay, that’s degusting.”

“I know,” she says, a little too emphatically, before continuing.

“Regina Torrance did something very similar to Amy. Her corpse was stuffed with activated charcoal and excelsior and stitched up by, get this, cat gut from an old tennis racket. She removed Amy’s knee and elbow joints and managed to replace them with springs and wire.”

I think of the wires and how Regina manipulated her wife’s body, but I don’t say anything. I let Mindy wind down, punctuating her stream of information with some wows and terribles of my own.

“You’re right,” I say. “We can’t talk about that in front of Dan.”

“Nope,”she replies.“See you tonight.”

Thirty-Seven

The office is quiet. Sheriff has been away on school visits out in the county. He loves talking to young people about responsibility and the law. Lately, he told me the other day, it’s been getting tougher to reach kids. In the past couple of years, he’s felt a shift from the police are your friends to distrust and skepticism. Even in places like uber liberal Port Townsend where very little violent crime takes place and where there is no racial profiling—at least none that I’ve heard about—there is a change in the air. Fewer acknowledgments, our blues say, when walking into a store for something after a shift.

I think of incorrigible and smug Tyra and how she cut me off. I wonder now if she saw me as the “other side” or if she had something to hide herself.

I sift through the court docket and telephone messages before I write up my interview reports—one for Tyra and one for Chantelle. Sheriff will read them later tonight, and I’ll hit him up with additional details tomorrow morning.

It’s almost six.

I look like I’ve slept in my clothes.

Which I sort of did.

Out the back door and home in sixteen minutes, I turn on the noisy old shower, so it will heat up. I tear off my clothes and let the barely hot water spray over me. Old Victorians are charming only on the outside. Unless one has an endless bank account to remodel. That includes plumbing that doesn’t clang. My mind touches on the last few days and how my old life has melded with the new. The tapes. The case. I can’t stop drawing out the similarities between the Wheaton kids and my own situation at that age.

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