Don’t Look Behind You

people.
    She had no idea that his estate was worth $5 million!
    There were no signs that a woman had lived there; it was definitely a bachelor’s pad, with no feminine touches to soften its rough edges.
    The yellow notes were mostly prosaic: “I must be sure and stay hydrated,” and “60 Minutes—Sunday, Channel 7, 7 o’clock.”
    A few seemed to reflect his state of mind: “I have had my share of trouble and sadness—Man has a [
sic
] astounding ability to survive lifes [
sic
] unhappyiness [
sic
].”
    However, one was puzzling; it seemed to be a quote that the dead man had copied.
    “Ty: ‘I won’t stop until I find her bones!’”
    What on earth, Kathleen wondered, was that about?
    Kathleen Huget learned the name of the dead man: Robert Hansen. A common surname—my mother’s maiden name—and also the name of a television reporter who became interested in the story hidden behind the story: Chris Hansen.
    Someone had been to the house in Auburn before Kathleen, and they had removed personal papers and anything that might have been of value. She learned that Bob Hansen hadn’t been ill or incapacitated. In fact, he’d routinelywalked the banks of the Green River for miles every day, picking up cans, bottles, and other garbage that marred the peacefulness of the river that had recently become infamous due to the murders committed there by the Green River Killer.
    She wondered what might have caused the desperate depression that led to Hansen’s suicide on August 4.
    Being inside the yellow house too long could become oppressive, but the weather was nice and Kathleen began to meet neighbors as she carried garbage containers and donation bags out to her SUV. They were all quite open to talking about their late neighbor, although opinions differed.
    Hansen’s male neighbors spoke of him as being a good guy—a man’s man—but the women who lived nearby didn’t seem nearly as taken with him. Apparently he had seen females as second-class citizens.
    The days passed, and Kathleen felt a presence in the house. It wasn’t that someone was actually there, at least not any living entity. If she believed ghosts could harm her, she might have been afraid. She felt that someone was asking her for help, and another presence wanted her to go away.
    “I was never frightened,” she remembers. “But I felt a residue of rage, the sense that someone or something hated my going through the house. I actually found myself speaking out loud a few times, saying, ‘I’m not afraid of you! You don’t scare me, and you can’t hurt me!’”
    Edgar Smith,* the next-door neighbor, told her that he had found his neighbor’s body.
    “We had a kind of signal system,” he said. “When he got up in the morning, he’d come outside and blow this horn he had. It was from an old car he had once, and it went, Ooga! Ooga! When I heard that horn go off, I knew he was all right. He wasn’t that young anymore, and, of course, he lived all alone.
    “This one morning—August 4—I didn’t hear the horn. I looked over at his garage and the windows looked like they were fogged over with smoke,” Edgar recalled. “I knew instantly what had happened.”
    His neighbor had been dead of carbon monoxide poisoning for several hours.
    When she began cleaning out the house on Green River Road, Kathleen Huget had no idea of its history and knew nothing about the former owner’s life. She and her husband, Jeff, knew the attorney who was representing the estate of the dead man because they belonged to the same country club, but of course he was not at liberty to discuss his late client’s affairs, and the Hugets knew better than to ask.
    Puzzled, Kathleen googled Bob Hansen’s name and date of death on her computer. Hansen, like Olsen and Carlsen, was a common Danish name, and the Northwest is rife with Scandinavians. Finally she found the short video that investigative reporter Chris Hansen had done for NBC News. It was about a son who was suing his deceased father because he believed that his father had killed his mother.
    Joann.
    Joann Hansen had simply vanished almost fifty years earlier and had never been found—alive or dead.
    That was unusual enough to be picked up by news services, and Chris Hansen’s segment on it was only a few minutes long, but it was enough to make Kathleen want to know more about the circumstances.
    Kathleen Huget felt a cold shiver when she looked at an area behind the house, not a pantry exactly,