Don’t Look Behind You

Maybe it had started when he was a little boy—when he had to go with his father to the dreaded Stump Farm, or for some other reason no one knew about.
    It is said that in old age, we become who we were when we were young—only more so. Happy people are fun to be around even when they are long past social security age, and angry people are as sour as dill pickles when they are elderly.
    In his almost eighty-four years, Bob Hansen had become only more paranoid and resentful of others.

Chapter Eighteen
THE SILENT HORN
    On Tuesday morning , August 4, 2009, the neighborhood on 14th Avenue in Auburn was very quiet. Forty-seven years earlier plus six days, Joann Hansen had disappeared. Perhaps the date had some meaning for Bob Hansen. Possibly, he had chosen this day at random.
    His next-door neighbor finished his breakfast and realized that he hadn’t heard the familiar “ooga-ooga” of Bob’s antique automobile horn.
    He walked the ten or twelve feet next door and could see that the garage windows were fogged over. When he found a clear spot to look inside, he saw Bob Hansen sitting as still as death behind the steering wheel of his car. He knew instantly that Bob hadn’t died of a stroke or heart attack; he had died the way he’d once told Marv Milosevich he’d chosen.
    By his own hand. With the help of carbon monoxide. His skin was the characteristic bright cherry red that appears when carbon monoxide shuts off oxygen in the blood.
    Some might say that Robert Milton Hansen’s death was a prime example of “What goes around, comes around.”
    His life had ended in ashes. He was alone in an empty house and he had alienated everyone who might have been there for him when he was an old man.
    Hansen would never achieve his dream of starting life over in Costa Rica with a new young woman. That country had barred him as a candidate for citizenship. The luxurious condo he had furnished lavishly wouldn’t be his home—ever.
    But he had avoided living in a nursing home.
    He had told Marv Milosevich that he would go out of this world in his own way. He had accomplished that bleak ambition; his final act ensured that he was in control. Or was he? The chilling aspect of suicide by carbon monoxide is that, at a certain point, the brain is still active—but the subject cannot move. If Bob Hansen had changed his mind partway through his suicide plan, paralysis would have already overtaken his body.
    There had been no going back.
    There was little of any value in Bob Hansen’s last house. Everything was secondhand, worn, and cheap. Hansen’s yellow notes and his journals remained—on almost all of them he’d written about mundane things: reminders, his opinions, scraps and bits of disorganized news left behind for strangers to find.
    Ty, Nicole Hansen, and Cindy Tyler removed only the stacks of photo albums that Bob had kept since he was twenty. There were faded pictures of their mother in some of them, and photos of themselves as babies and in theirgrowing-up years. They could all see Joann’s tenderness toward her babies; it was something to hold on to.
    There were forty times as many photographs of Bob posing with dead animals, birds, and fish—his trophies from sixty or more years of hunting and fishing.
    That was his legacy.
    This was the house that Kathleen Huget had walked into a few weeks later, the rooms where she would “hear” both a silent cry for help and a sense of looming rage and danger.
    “I’m not afraid of you,” Kathleen had shouted into the empty rooms, and her voice didn’t tremble at all. “I’m not afraid of you! You don’t scare me, and you can’t hurt me!”
    Initially, she knew nothing about the man who had lived and died in this house, but the eerie presence of evil she sensed couldn’t be denied.
    The Realtor friend of Kathleen’s had told her she could have anything she found in the house. A lot of it was usable if not new. She neither needed nor wanted it, but she didn’t feel as if she could just take it to the dump.
    “I had an estate sale,” she said. “I figured if there was any profit, I could give it to charity.”
    Lots of people showed up on the day of the sale. Sophisticated bargain hunters soon moved on after they saw that there were no precious antiques or collectors’ items in the yellow rambler in Auburn.
    “But there were poor people who came,” Kathleen recalls. “There were quite a few migrant workers in the area during harvest season in August and