Don’t Look Behind You

hill east of Kent, Washington. They belong to an elite country club, and they live comfortably. Kathleen was once a flight attendant and Jeff was a varsity football player at the University of Washington. They found each other when they were in their middle years, they’re very happily married, and they share interests but allow each other to follow separate paths when it comes to hobbies.
    Kathleen is an attractive woman with startling blue eyes, wildly spiky blond hair, and a flair for fashion. Her main profession is as an interior designer—but she’s not afraid to get her hands dirty or tackle physical labor. She is also a frustrated detective. When she attended Eastern Washington University in Cheney, she took a number of courses in criminal justice and law. Her internship was with the Spokane County public defender, where her boss was Dick Cease. Cease spent twenty-four years as the public defender, serving as the first head of that office, which was created in 1970. Kathleen did a lot of backgroundchecks and research, and she felt she might have found her niche. But her life changed and went in another direction.
    Her curiosity, however, did not.
    I don’t think she would disagree with me when I say she is also something of a psychic, or, more properly, a sensitive. All of us have the capability to listen to other voices in other rooms when there is actually no one there—but most of us don’t want to tap into that or open ourselves up to ghostlike entities who have secrets to tell.
    Kathleen Huget has a friend who is a Realtor, who has called upon Kathleen a few times to clean out houses where the owners have left abruptly. To make a house appealing to prospective buyers, someone has to sort through what is valuable, what can be donated to charities, and what is ready for a trip to the dump.
    In the late summer of 2009, Kathleen—with Jeff’s help—agreed to clean up a house in the Kent Valley so that it could go on the market. She had no idea who had lived there, but she was told that the owner had committed suicide on the property. She would have discovered that soon enough by herself; the double garage still had pipes, tubes, and other paraphernalia that had been used to direct carbon monoxide into a vehicle with no ventilation.
    As she worked from room to room, she also found a book titled
Final Exit.
The author is Derek Humphry, who started the Hemlock Society, which supported an individual’s rights to choose his own time and means of death. When the book was published in 1991, critics were shocked at the number of “recipes” for suicide it held.
    In the copy Kathleen held, she saw that someone had used a yellow highlighter to underline several methods Humphry suggested: death by suffocation with a plastic bag, death by barbiturates—after first complaining to a physician that one could not sleep and asking for much milder sleeping pills to allay suspicion and then hoarding them—and, finally, asphyxiation with carbon monoxide using car exhaust.
    The third solution was obviously the one the late homeowner had used.
    Being in an empty house where a suicide had occurred didn’t bother Kathleen Huget, but she was curious about the things that had been left behind. When the draft from an open door blew in, dozens of yellow notepad pages, tacked to every wall, fluttered. They were mostly reminders, scrawled words that she figured someone whose memory was faltering had written.
    A man had lived here only weeks before; from the notes, she felt it might be someone who was in poor health and feared his mind was failing him, someone who had given up all hope.
    The house where she spent her few weeks working was a nice house, a yellow rambler that was neither modest nor ostentatious. Other than the uninspired and neglected landscaping, the exterior belied the condition of the interior. The lawn and shrubs were neat enough, and there were several sheds and outbuildings at the rear of the home. The house was 1,490 square feet with three bedrooms and two and a half baths, built on a fifth of an acre.
    But the inside of the house on 14th NE in Auburn wasbleak. As Kathleen worked her way from room to room, the things she found were either well used or strange—or both. She realized that the man who had died here had purchased almost everything from thrift stores. Although the house itself was well built and upscale, she thought that the occupant must have fallen on hard times. That happened to a lot of