Don’t Look Behind You

loved her father and worried about him, there were many things she didn’t know about him, and their contact had been infrequent after he moved to Alaska with Renee.
    Fifteen years after her father vanished, Gypsy no longer knew where Renee Curtiss and her mother lived; they had moved often after they vacated the old yellow house. Still, she was encouraged to hear how positive Jan Rhodes was when she said she believed that she could find Joe Tarricone.

Chapter Six
    It was on a June day in 2007 when Gypsy landed in Hawaii after her ship had returned from China. She planned to catch the first flight she could get to Seattle.
    Suddenly her phone rang and a male voice identified himself as Sergeant Ben Benson from the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office.
    “You know that place on Canyon Road in Puyallup?” he began.
    “Yes,” she said cautiously, although she felt her skin prickle.
    “Well … we found remains—”
    “I knew it,” Gypsy said. “I knew it! All this time. She killed my father there. Renee killed him!”
    Although she was initially elated to hear that Benson was working on her father’s disappearance, she didn’t allow herself to totally trust the Pierce County homicide sergeant.
    “Now,” Benson said in 2010, “I’m one of her favorite people, but when we first met I was just another detective who had failed to locate her father years ago. I had to prove to her that I would stick with the case.”
    Gypsy told Ben Benson that her father had visited her in Hawaii in July 1978. It hadn’t been a very good visit as far as she was concerned; Joe Tarricone was so besotted with Renee Curtiss that she was all he talked about, and he wouldn’t listen to her warnings to take things a little slower. But Gypsy told Benson that her father had changed in the last year or so before he disappeared. She realized now that he must have been in the last months of his life during his visit to Hawaii. He had played with her children and taken the youngest out in his stroller, but he seemed different somehow.
    “He was a very secretive man,” Gypsy explained. “Even with his seven children. I do know he always carried lots of cash with him; he had a briefcase full of big bills, but we never knew where the money came from.”
    Gypsy said she was sometimes afraid that her father could have been into something that was illegal.
    “He almost wasn’t in his right mind, you know, not at the end. He was too crazy over Renee.”
    Joe had cooked for Gypsy’s family as he always did and had even gone to a local supermarket to buy prime meat to fill her freezer.
    “But he wasn’t like he had been—he wasn’t like my real dad,” she remembers sadly. “He was crazy to get back to visit Renee.”
    Joe had also traveled to New Mexico in July or August 1978. He visited with his younger children, Dean and Gina; his ex-wife, Rose; and his best friend, Robert Silva—whom he’d called “Bobby Boy” for years. In fact,he stayed with the Silvas—who still lived right across the street from where Rose lived.
    Benson later spoke to Silva and learned that Joe had come down to Albuquerque, carrying his big briefcase full of bills—probably a few thousand dollars. Joe and Bob Silva even went to Disneyland together for what would prove to be their final outing. For them, two grown men going to Disneyland wasn’t unusual; the men were buddies going way back and Joe Tarricone had always enjoyed Disneyland. He had a childlike enthusiasm for the wonderland there.
    Joe’s ex-wife, Rose, sighed as she told Ben Benson she could not imagine how the tragedy weeks after she’d last seen him could have happened to Joe. She recalled that she had often said to Gypsy, “I can’t understand why someone like your father would
ever
get mixed up with people like that—that Renee and her mother. That wasn’t like him—”
    Benson was learning that, with Joe Tarricone, all roads led back to the mystifying Renee Curtiss.
    Ben Benson continued to search for what he could learn about the two women who had once lived in the old yellow house on Canyon Road. Geraldine and Renee hadn’t kept up correspondence with the people who knew them slightly in 1978, and no one in Pierce County appeared to know where they were in 2007.
    He had begun with computer searches for Renee Curtiss. Her driver’s license had been renewed in Washington State on August 1, 2003, despite her many DUIs. Her dateof birth was August 1, 1953. That would make her