J. Jance: Justice Denied

She put the treasured photo up on the mantel, settled cross-legged on the floor, and then gathered her rambunctious twins to her as if finding solace in their wiggly presence. Having corralled their toys into the toy box, spurred on by an amazing combination of motherly prodding and patience, they now cuddled up next to their mother on the carpeted floor. With their heads in her lap and their feet sticking out in opposite directions, they gradually settled down. One of them clutched the tattered corner of a faded yellow blanket while the other industriously sucked his thumb.

Waiting for them to drift off, I tried to remember if Scott and Kelly used to do that when they were little-just fall over and go to sleep like that, regardless of where they were or what was going on-but I didn’t have a single memory I could focus in on. At the time, I wasn’t that kind of a father. Driven, intent on earning enough money to support them and also intent on drinking too much, I had recklessly squandered my own children’s childhoods. It’s something I’ve come to regret every day of my life.

“How old were you when it happened?” I asked.

“When my father went missing? I was eight,” DeAnn answered. “Old enough to be scared. It was bad enough that my father had disappeared into that awful place and didn’t come back. I saw all those terrible pictures on TV. I kept worrying that if one mountain could blow up like that, maybe the others would, too. I mean, we were living in Kent back then. Whenever the sun was shining, Mount Rainier was right there with us. At least, that’s how it seemed.”

Karen and I had been living down by Lake Tapps when the mountain blew. It had felt the same way to me, too. If God decided to send an overheated avalanche of rock and ash roaring down a mountainside at 150 miles per hour, Mount Rainier was way too close for comfort. It didn’t seem as if there would be nearly enough time to get out of the way.

“Since they never found any sign of him, I assume your father stayed on the missing list-permanently.”

DeAnn nodded again. “That’s right. I’ve always thought it would have been easier for me if we’d at least found something of him to bury. Maybe then I could have gotten over it and moved on. My mother did. She was impatient. She didn’t bother waiting around seven years to have him declared dead. She divorced him, remarried, and made a whole new life for herself, but I just couldn’t. They did declare him dead eventually, but it didn’t change anything.”

She paused while tears welled in her eyes. She pursed her lips. “He called me his princess,” she added brokenly, all the while struggling to control her emotions. “He said that one day I’d be carried away by a prince on a white horse. My mother told me Dad was just being silly and making those things up. Donnie’s a lot like him. Tells the kids stories. And he’s an engineer, too. No pocket protector, though.”

Until right then I had been doing the job Ross Connors asked me to do, but I don’t think I had really believed in it. As far as I and the rest of the SHIT squad were concerned, Ross Connors’s “missing persons thing” had us off on a harebrained tangent that didn’t make a whole lot of sense and wasn’t worth either our time or our energy. But in talking to DeAnn Cosgrove I could see that the effort was making sense to her.

“So what happened after the report was filed?” I asked.

DeAnn shrugged. “Not much,” she said. “At least not as far as I was concerned. Everyone was too worried about the volcano and what was going on with that. But somebody finally came to the house and told my mother that it was hopeless-that my father wasn’t ever coming home and she should just give up on it. And so she did. We had a little memorial service because like I said, there wasn’t anything to bury.”

I could envision DeAnn Cosgrove as a brokenhearted little girl, lost and grieving, while the grown-ups around her, preoccupied with their own difficulties, walked away from hers and moved on.

“But you didn’t give up, did you.”

“No,” DeAnn agreed. “Never. I loved him too much. I couldn’t.”

And you still haven’t, I thought.

“I miss him every single day,” DeAnn added. “I wish he could meet his grandkids-so he could tell them the same kinds of stories he used to tell me. I wouldn’t tell him they were silly, though. I’d want them to believe everything he said.”

“Where’s your mother these days?” I asked.

“Once my father was declared dead and the insurance money finally came through, she and Jack, her new husband, bought a place up in Leavenworth,” she said. “Just outside Leavenworth,” she added. “I guess I shouldn’t call Jack a new husband. He’s been around for a long time. They celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary next year. That’s fifteen years longer than she was married to Daddy.”

So Mrs. Cosgrove hadn’t spent much time waiting around for her missing husband to show up or playing the grieving widow. If they’d finally gone to the formality of having her former husband officially declared dead, it seemed to me as though someone in the world of officialdom should have noticed the transaction and removed Anthony Cosgrove’s name from the list of officially missing persons.

DeAnn apparently read my mind about her mother’s unseemly matrimonial haste. “Mom and Jack got married in January of the following year,” she said. “I don’t like the man much-never have. He’s an overbearing jerk. And we had our issues, especially when I was a teenager. That’s why I ended up living with my grandmother-my father’s mother-down in Kent most of the time I was in high school. But by then there was money coming in from Social Security, so it didn’t seem like I was a burden.”

“But you said there was insurance?”

DeAnn nodded. “Quite a bit,” she said. “Some of it was group insurance and the rest of it was stuff Daddy owned. There was one smaller policy that was just for me. Donnie and I used that to make the down payment on this house.”

Insurance proceeds are often the motivator in homicide cases, but not in this one. A payout accompanied by a seven-year delay seemed unlikely, but it was still worth checking into.

“What’s your mother’s name?” I asked.

“Lawrence,” DeAnn answered. “Carol Lawrence. And her husband is Jack. Like I said, they live up in Leavenworth now. If you want to talk to them, I can get you the phone number, but I don’t see that it’ll do much good. I doubt they could tell you any more about what happened than I can.”

I made a note of their names anyway. I didn’t bother taking down the phone number. I knew if I needed to reach them I’d be able to locate Jack and Carol Lawrence’s phone number-listed or not.

I was about to put my notebook away, but then I looked at DeAnn Cosgrove and could see she wasn’t done talking. Maybe after years of not talking about it, she was ready.

“Anything else you can tell me about your dad?” I asked.

“I was always surprised that he went fishing that weekend,” she said. “As far as I know, he hadn’t ever gone before. He didn’t even like fish that much. What he liked were airplanes. He loved airplanes.”

“You mean as a hobby?”

“As in every way. That’s what he did, you see. He worked for Boeing, too, designing airplanes. I’m not really sure what he did there. I wish now I’d been older so I could have known which planes he worked on and what he did. Maybe I’ve ridden on one of the ones he helped design.”

“You probably have,” I said.

“I hope so,” she replied. I put the notebook in my jacket pocket. “So what happens now?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I may check with the people down at Mount Saint Helens and make sure that they haven’t learned something we don’t know about. And I may want to speak to your mother as well. What about your grandmother, the one who lived in Kent?”