Chapter 19 #3
Marjorie nodded. “I did. It’s one of the reasons why I was so, … so insistent about nobody else moving in there. I mean, it just never should have happened. I can’t believe that anybody would have sold it to you, especially with young children, especially when you wouldn’t have known.”
Devon grimaced. “Exactly. So I can only presume there’s some time frame when it’s no longer required to disclose those things,” she suggested.
“I really don’t know, and maybe the listing Realtor didn’t even know.
I’ll ask my own Realtor. Surely the listing Realtor wouldn’t have sold it to me if anything illegal was going on. ”
Marjorie frowned at her. “She must not be a very good Realtor if she didn’t even suss that out because most people in town here would have known.”
“I think it may depend on the age of the people involved in this sale as well, because this has come as a surprise to more than just me. It was fifty years ago, after all.”
Marjorie nodded slowly. “Yes, that’s quite true, but still you should get your money back.”
Devon stared at her. “Even if I could, I have nowhere else to go.” Marjorie tut-tutted for a long moment. Devon leaned forward and asked, “What did you see, when you saw a ghost?”
She looked over at her and whispered, “It was just this weird shimmering that never seemed to quit. It was very strange and definitely not something I wanted to spend any more time looking at,” she added, with a shudder.
“I mean, it was pretty awful really. Until you see something like that, you don’t realize just how bad it can be to confront a ghost. I had no idea such a thing was even a possible,” she muttered.
“It was really bad,” she repeated. “My husband told me that I was being foolish and that I shouldn’t be perpetuating the rumors.
Even when I told him that I wasn’t lying, he wouldn’t believe me.
But,” she added, with a smirk, “he also wouldn’t come and check it out himself.
Because of that, I told him that he was a coward. ”
Marjorie cackled. “He was scared, but he never admitted it. He just looked at me and told me that we aren’t meant to know about some things, and that’s one of them.”
*
Cold cases this old were always a pain. Camden groaned.
They always came with incomplete files, procedures that were not completed as they would be today. And it always seemed like—he didn’t want to say, They were fraught with shoddy work, but definitely not the level of work and detail they have nowadays. Of course they also didn’t have DNA back then.
They didn’t have a lot of stuff some fifty years ago.
And he had to wonder if the killer would still be at large if it had happened in this day and age.
It’s scary to think that somebody could have done this and yet continued to get away with it for as long as they had.
He could only hope that the guilt—or the possibility of getting caught—haunted them when they were asleep and also when awake. Camden sighed.
Camden had gone through the file, but there really hadn’t been much. The neighbor had called it in after seeing the lights on all night, and then no sign of the kids getting up and leaving for school as they always did.
And the poor officer who had gone in to investigate had to go on an extended leave afterward because of everything he had witnessed that morning. It had been that bad. Of course it was a small town, so that officer had also personally known the victims, and that always just added to the trauma.
Camden’s heart went out to the man as he realized just how difficult that wellness check would have been.
And would he have known to step back as soon as he realized something was terribly wrong and just call in forensics?
Or would he have just continued to stumble through the house, checking on everybody?
Camden didn’t know, and, of course, the file was as incomplete as anything he’d ever seen.
That was also devastating because, back then, the officer would have had limited options or sources.
Camden shook his head. No hope of getting any answers from the file. And that’s not what he wanted either. Surely some answers were somewhere, somehow.
But he did note that the one remaining son was listed as a person of interest. But this so-called person of interest had a solid alibi. He’d been working the night shift, and apparently so had three other people with him.
As alibis went, that was a pretty solid one.
I mean, how did you get everybody else to lie?
Particularly given the gruesomeness of the actual crime itself.
Camden checked for the names of the detectives at the time, and, making note of them, he checked his own internal database to find that one of them was dead and gone.
But the other one who had done the investigation on this case was still around.
Considering that he was well into his late eighties, there was no guarantee he had retained enough cognitive abilities to even remember this case.
Still, Camden checked for him and found him living close by, at his daughter’s house.
So Camden didn’t wait for permission and just got up and walked out because one thing he’d learned was to follow his instincts.
He called the daughter from the road, identified himself, and then asked if he could speak to Robert.
The daughter relayed that he was having his nap at the moment. “He’ll probably be awake in another few minutes and would really enjoy having some company around.”
“I want to talk to him about one of his old cases.”
She laughed. “He’ll love that even more. Nothing he likes better than shop talk with anybody who’ll sit there and listen.”
Camden smiled at that. “Sounds like a cop to me.”
“Yep, he sure is,” she muttered. “Anyway, we’ll see you in a few minutes.” With that, she ended the call.
Camden drove over to the address he had on file, and, as he got closer, he realized it wasn’t all that far away from Camden’s own home, and, therefore, from Devon’s home.
As he got out and walked closer, he looked around, finding himself only a couple blocks away.
So this detective probably knew the victims quite well, which would have been heartbreaking for everybody but particularly for any of the cops working the scene.
He wasn’t even sure how well forensics would have handled it either, to be honest. Particularly back in the day, when there also wasn’t necessarily anybody who had the training to handle this stuff.
As he walked up to the front door, it opened in front of him, and a woman stood there, smiling.
She nodded. “You even look like a cop.”
He grinned at her. “Once and always, that’s just the code.”
She nodded again. “And he would agree with you. Come on in.” Then she turned and called back, “Dad, your visitor is here.” She turned to Camden. “His hearing’s a little rough nowadays, but, considering his age, he’s doing pretty great.”
She led Camden into a living room, where an old man was seated on a chair, a blanket over his knees. Camden realized it was a good thing he had come because it looked as if the old man could go out at any time. He smiled and called out, “Hello.” He introduced himself, showing him his badge.
The other man’s face lit up, and he rubbed his hands together, inviting him to sit closer. “Oh, I like this. Always happy to help out on a case.”
Camden laughed. “Maybe not this one.”
At that, his smile fell away, as if trying to figure out which case would be the troublesome one. Then his gaze lit with fear. “Not that one. Please, not that one.” Camden sat down on a chair close by, then leaned forward and whispered, “Yes, that one. I’m sorry.”
Robert’s eyes filled with tears, and he shook his head.
“That should never have happened,” he whispered, his voice barely audible, “and it’s the one case that still haunts me.
” He leaned over and reached for a tissue on the coffee table beside him.
He shook his head. “I never knew if I’d done something wrong or if I could have done more.
” He whispered, his voice shaking, “I guess I always knew this day would come.”
Camden looked at him in surprise and shook his head. “We don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.”
The old man looked at him and sighed. “You can say that,” he began, “but I could never get rid of the feeling that I had missed something. And yet, every few years, I would pull out the files and take another look. Everybody else had given up. Even after Leonard Jr., the only surviving family member passed away—close family member anyway,” he corrected.
“Everybody else just put the case out of their mind. It would never be closed on the books, but I knew that boy.” Robert shook his head.
“It just wasn’t in him. If the father hadn’t died at the time, I would have bet money that it was him, the father. ”
Camden suggested, “Any chance that the father was the one doing the killing, and someone fought back and he died because of his wounds?”
Robert shrugged. “We never could find a murder weapon, and that makes it a little harder, doesn’t it?
We did consider that, since he would have been the one person whom all of us agreed would make a great suspect just because he was so mean.
… Most of us knew him. Camas was that kind of a place back then. It was just a small town.”
Robert continued. “Everybody here knew everybody, and Leonard Sr. was cranky, miserable, and just plain mean. I’m not trying to speak ill of the dead, but, at some point in time, you got to call a spade a spade, and … Senior definitely had a mean streak.”