Don’t Look Behind You

fifty-four in 2007. Her driver’s license photo showed a brown-haired woman with a pixie haircut and blue eyes. She had a pronounced dimple on the left side of her mouth, and she smiled brightly at the camera. Unlike most driver’s license photos, this one was attractive. Benson figured if she looked this good in her midfifties, she had probably been a knockout in her midtwenties.
    Over the years, Renee had used several names with the same social security number: Renee R. Curtiss, R. R. Curtiss, Renee Wallach,* and R. C. Wallach.*
    After she and her mother had left Puyallup twenty-nine years ago, without paying rent or filling the oil tank, they had lived in a myriad of places. Benson traced the addresses listed. Apparently they had moved first to Tacoma—only ten miles away from Canyon Road—and then lived at five addresses in Seattle; two addresses in Sausalito, California; two addresses in Bellevue, Washington; and briefly in San Carlos, Woodside, and San Francisco, California.
    And he found Renee’s current address: a condominium in Seattle.
    Apparently she was still alive. At least Benson didn’t find any death certificate for her. That she might have died was one possibility he had considered.
    He drove by Renee’s condominium and took surreptitious photos of it, noting that it was in a good neighborhood and definitely upscale. But he didn’t knock on thedoor. First, he wanted to get as much background as possible on the mother and daughter’s travels and activities since 1978.
    Florence Geraldine Bogner Hesse—Geri—had lived with Renee at every address listed. They appeared to have been very tightly bonded. But, of course, when Benson checked death records, they indicated that Geraldine had died in 2000. He sighed; there was no way to interview her now, seven years later.
    He learned later that, in an eerie way, Geri Hesse was still with Renee. Her ashes rested in an urn on the fireplace mantel in Renee’s condo. Geri still accompanied her youngest daughter whenever Renee moved on.
    Benson suspected that Renee and Geri might have been mother-and-daughter con artists who had used men to build their fortunes. If that was true, they must have been good at it; he found no felony criminal record for either.
    During the months of June and July 2007, Benson found that Renee and Geraldine had a number of close relatives. Their extended family members lived in either Washington State or Alaska. Tracing their family tree proved to be a convoluted and difficult process, but Benson was able to make some initial connections.
    He learned that Geri Hesse had a sister named Lillian. When Lillian gave birth to a boy, Ron, in July 1947, Geri had been envious. They had always been somewhat competitive; the Bogner sisters were born only fourteen months apart.
    Geri, the younger sister, had no children at the time, but she heard about a baby boy who was born on July 9, 1948,to a mother who gave him up. Geri arranged to adopt him in the fall of that year. At that time she was married—for a very short time—to a man named Notaro, and she named her infant son Nick. Benson figured that in the summer of 2007, Nick Notaro would be closing in on sixty.
    Census records showed that Geri had subsequently given birth to a girl she named Cassie* on June 3, 1952. Her second biological child was Renee, who was born fourteen months later.
    At some point, Geri had married again at least once; that would be where the “Hesse” name came from. Both Cassie and Renee had used Notaro as their last name until they married.
    As the Notaro/Hesse family tree kept sprouting new limbs in Benson’s investigation, he drew up a chart so he could remember the entire cast of characters.
    The mystery of the man named Isaak was quickly solved. He was neither Geri’s nor Renee’s boyfriend; he had been married to Renee’s aunt Lillian when Joe Tarricone vanished. At the time, her aunt had lived only a few miles from Canyon Road East.
    Florence Geraldine had had numerous last names, and so had her daughters Cassie and Renee. Renee’s cousins—Ron and Dean Isaak, who were Lillian’s sons—talked to Ben Benson about their memories of the late summer of 1978. Their mother was currently living in Tacoma, and their father had passed away a few months before. That would be Ray Isaak, the man the Carlson family had met at the yellow rental house.
    Renee’s cousins recalled that Renee had thrown a “bigbarbecue” party in the late seventies at