Red House Blues Read online

  RED HOUSE BLUES

  By Sallie Tierney

  © 2011 Sallie Tierney

  Cover Design by Margaret Magee

  Published by Sallie Tierney at Smashwords

  Smashwords Edition 1.0 August 2011

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

  This book is a work of fiction. Places, events, and situations in this ebook are purely fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is coincidental.

  Dedicated to my son Paul who lived two years

  in the Red House and escaped relatively unscathed.

  SINGING THE RED HOUSE BLUES

  lyric by S. Pike

  Red House not far from here

  frowns down over the Sound

  take my advice, friend

  if you pass this way,

  don’t slow down.

  Save yourself the sorrow,

  save yourself the pain,

  bypass this damned house,

  if you want to see tomorrow.

  An evil wind blows from the bay

  an evil turn of time and tide

  Nothing thrives but pain, my friend

  in those haunted rooms

  nothing but misery inside.

  Save yourself the sorrow

  save yourself the pain

  bypass this damned house

  if you want to see tomorrow.

  I didn’t heed my own advice

  like a fool I sheltered there

  that was the last I knew, my friend

  of light or hope

  but the first I knew of despair.

  Save yourself the sorrow

  save yourself the pain

  bypass this damned house

  if you want to see tomorrow.

  Burn the Red House to the ground

  do us all a favor, friend

  strike a match, dance in the flames

  scatter its ashes wide

  salt the earth on which it stands.

  Save yourself the sorrow

  save yourself a world of pain

  bypass this damned house

  if you want to see tomorrow.

  PROLOGUE

  Seattle, Washington Territory – 1864

  Frank Flynn wooed the woman for two agonizing weeks, from the day the bride ship docked in Elliott Bay until that morning three days ago when she agreed to marry him. Now, with the certificate signed by himself, Edith O’Brien (now Flynn), two witnesses and the Justice of the Peace, Frank could get on with the life he had envisioned years before when he left his family home in Chicago.

  He would master the wild western frontier out here in Washington Territory. His new shingle mill at the foot of Yesler Street would prosper along with little Seattle. He envisioned how he would become a rich lumber baron like the men he admired down the coast in San Francisco. His handsome wife would manage a respectable household and bear him children to carry on his name. Maybe someday he would run for mayor. He would prove his father wrong about his prospects and abilities. The village of Seattle was his chance to become everything he had ever dreamed he could be.

  What he never dreamed, never imagined was that he would fall instantly, deeply in love with the bride. Frank was one of a hundred other prospective grooms who met the schooner from Boston when it finally docked at midnight on May 16th. The exhausted women debarked by lantern light, tottering pale and frightened down the plank, belongings clutched in trembling hands.

  They were a pitiful gaggle of females, except for one. That one woman stood out in the crowd. She carried herself straight and tall on the dark dock, a carpetbag in each hand. Clearly she was a woman with a purpose, a courageous and stalwart female. To his way of thinking she was the pick of the litter. That was the one for him. That was a woman fit for a king of industry.

  Her hair under the sky-blue hat was black as the bay. She was trim of waist but buxom, if what he could see of her beneath her wool coat was any indication. But it was her eyes that scanned the crowd of eager men until she found his, that settled the matter for Frank. She looked for all the world as if she were sizing up a herd of horses, and having compared their various confirmations had made her selection with a determination and intelligence that shone brighter than any lantern. He pushed through the crowd and introduced himself.

  Her name was Edith O'Brien, and she was of immigrant Irish parents, as was Frank. She was the second daughter of ten children, but the only one of the siblings to set out on her own beyond Boston. At twenty-seven she was past the first bloom of maidenhood but that went a ways to explain why she had come across a continent to find a husband. That was fine with Frank. A woman out here needed guts and some experience in the world if she wasn’t to wither like an uprooted seedling.

  Frank had started to build his house on Fir Street as soon as young Asa Mercer proposed sending back East for women. With a population of over two hundred bachelors and few respectable females to choose from, Seattle needed to import willing women if it was to become anything more than a logging camp on the edge of Puget Sound. Every man who wanted a wife kicked in to hire a ship and crew. Of course some men were just there temporarily to make a pile of money and then move on to more civilized places, but Frank knew at once he was there to stay. A wife was the next logical step in his plan to make something of himself. He eagerly paid Mercer his three hundred dollars advance money and went back to work.

  When the brides arrived six months later there were only a few finishing touches left on his house. It was by and large ready to receive a wife, should one come his way. By no means was it a mansion. He couldn’t afford that yet. It was substantial and well planned, however, standing two stories plus a gabled attic on the brow of the overlooking Elliott Bay. Its wide windows took in the view, and a fine porch curved around to the south side of the house. A good place, Frank thought, to sit with his wife on warm summer evenings. He imagined children playing on the steps leading to a pretty garden his wife would plant.

  The siding was fashionable cedar shake from his own mill, the trim painted ivory white. The rooms smelled of forests, beeswax, and crisp linen the morning Frank Flynn proudly showed Edith O'Brien Flynn around the house he had built for her.

  Edith hated it on sight. It looked raw and primitive, not that she expressed that to her new husband. Instead, in the months that followed, she proceeded to change it in every way she could without actually tearing it down. She sent to Boston for ornately patterned wallpapers to cover the blank ivory plaster. Furniture arrived up the coast from San Francisco, crowding the rooms with curlicues of mahogany and cherry wood. Frank was happy to turn all such household matters over to his capable spouse. His people were “shanty Irish” whereas hers were “lace curtain Irish”. He bowed to her superior taste, a little in awe of her. Everything she did fascinated and mystified him. Though he admitted to himself he wasn’t overly fond of the deep redwood stain she decided to apply to the whole exterior of the house. She told him the color was elegant and courageous, that the house appeared to dominate the hill above town and reflected the status their family would soon enjoy in the community.

  Edith, for her part, appreciated Frank as the resourceful businessman and kind person that he was. She did not expect to love the man she married and wasn’t sure she knew what value such an emotion could have in her life. She came west for a secure and comfortable home. That was
enough for any woman in her circumstances. She supposed there might still be children. That was what came with the sort of life she had chosen, though she did not think of herself as particularly maternal. As it turned out she would never know what kind of mother she would have been.

  Almost a year to the day after she arrived in Seattle, Edith was in the dining room, large sheets of brown paper spread out over the table. She was sketching how she wanted the garden planted up. There would be an expanse of lawn to capture the view of the bay but include a thick hedge to obscure sight of the skid road a block away where teams of horses dragged logs down to the mills at the base of the hill. It was quite enough that during the day the noise could be deafening. Why Frank chose to build so close to the work site was beyond her understanding. She would much rather they lived on any other of Seattle’s seven hills, far from the stink from the mills and the shallow swampy bay. Some lovely houses were going in north of town. Edith intended to work on Frank to move them up there in a few years. In the meantime she meant to have the Red House as habitable as possible.

  A strand of silky black hair escaped from its pins and fell across her cheek. She straightened and tucked the hair back into place. She had better see to the meal. Frank would be home for supper soon. Edith had one of the Salish Indian girls to do the cleaning up but Edith enjoyed cooking. Managing the kitchen was a point of pride with her. She was an excellent baker, as had been her Irish mother. Today she would set out roast chicken, scalloped potatoes, and soft. warm biscuits. Frank’s favorite. He didn’t care for vegetables but she would offer glazed carrots, if only for the jewel-like color. She smiled at the thought that she was beginning to cater to his tastes. Perhaps love after all was creeping in the back door.

  In coming years she would clasp that last memory of him to her heart. Or perhaps over the years she convinced herself there had been that shimmer of love coming over her, memory contorting itself to her need. She would imagine her husky logger rushing home to her, praising the meal, a wide smile on his sweet ruddy face. Then he would reach for her hand and kiss the fingers one by one as if each was a tasty dessert.

  But Frank had not come home that evening. Strangers rushed into her house, yelling about a shooting, a riot down on Front Street by the mercantile. Nobody knew who started it. Drunks coming out of the Illahee bawdy house got into a ruckus with a group of Indians. Frank and some of his men tried to break it up. Someone pulled a gun and fired. Someone else fired back. In a second the gunpowder was thick in the air and five men were down. Two were dead. One Indian and Frank Flynn.

  Edith could have sold the house and gone back to Boston. She could have married another logger. For reasons she never divulged she stayed on, renting out rooms to mill workers and businessmen. In June of 1889 a glue fire started downtown in a paint shop, and by the time it was out most of Seattle had burned to the ground. The Red House was spared only by a shift of wind. Edith was fifty-two and had been ill for a year with what she told her boarders was “stomach trouble”. But she knew from the lump under her ribs that she was probably dying. With all Seattle a smoking wasteland for as far as she could see from the porch of her house on Fir Street hill, she decided she didn’t have the strength or will or time to start all over again. Even if the city rebuilt itself. She had lived her life on her own terms and she would leave it that way too.

  She climbed the stairs to the attic room where she could look out the oval window across the bay to Alki Point, and beyond to Bainbridge Island, and beyond that to the Olympic Mountains. The oval window Frank had crafted with such care. At sunset she lifted her husband’s old pistol to her head and ended her life. Her husband’s was the first violent death associated with the big red house. Edith O'Brien Flynn’s was the first suicide.

  Chapter 1

  Bellingham, Washington

  Present Day

  The homicide detectives from Seattle reminded Suzan of the couple who ran the Ebb Tide Motel back home in Oak Harbor, pleasant, serious, and comfortably ordinary. Not at all what she would have envisioned. They had driven two hours up to Bellingham to tell her she was a widow. Suzan had been expecting an official visit of some sort from the time Sean vanished nearly two years ago, though what she imagined was more along the lines of incarceration or overdose. She couldn’t get her mind around someone deliberately killing him.

  Strange things pop into your head when your life crashes full throttle into a wall. As the homicide detectives sat in her tiny living room telling her that her worst fears hadn’t been nearly bad enough, what bothered her most was that all she had to offer them was instant coffee and some stale Fig Newtons.

  Paula and Keith, as they asked Suzan to call them, murmured their condolences and posed their questions, both as standard issue as their tactfully concealed firearms. When was the last time she saw her husband? Had he contacted her since he left Bellingham? Had she known he was in Seattle? Did she know any of his friends there? Paula did most of the talking. They had probably decided on the drive up I-5 that this matter needed a woman’s touch.

  “Your husband didn’t have identification on him, Mrs. Pike,” said Paula, once Suzan had identified Sean from photos she felt would haunt her nightmares forever.

  “Suzan - please call me Suzan.” She suddenly realized she was no longer Mrs. Pike. Who was she now? A widow. What did she know about being a widow? She wasn’t even thirty yet.

  “Suzan,” said Paula. “Mr. Pike’s prints pulled up a Bellingham criminal record, which was how we got his name. With the record was a missing persons report you filed. Could you tell us about that, please?”

  “The missing persons report? I’m surprised the police kept that,” she said. “They told me they couldn’t help me. He technically wasn’t a missing person since he left voluntarily.” Suzan poured Paula some weak coffee. “He came home the day he got out of rehab, packed some things in a gym bag and left. Just like that.”

  “He didn’t indicate where he was going?”

  “No. I thought it would blow over. That he would be back when he cooled down or that he would at least let me know where he was staying so I could send mail. After a week I still hadn’t heard anything from him so I called his friend Tony, then Sean’s dad in Oak Harbor but they hadn’t heard from him either.”

  Suzan left out the part about wandering the neighborhood like a lost soul, and crying all night, every night. Paula’s soft voice and sad eyes told her she was already a pitiful specimen without any added embellishment.

  “I checked the hospitals and the police,” she said. “That’s when I reported him missing. The police told me he’d probably show up sooner or later. But I was afraid for him.”

  “Why was that? Did you think your husband was suicidal?”

  “I didn’t know. Anything could have happened,” she said, while thinking yes, of course I thought he might . . . and if he had killed himself it would have been my fault.

  “He’d been acting weird for a while. I didn’t know what was going on with him. It scared me.”

  “He was violent toward you, Suzan?”

  The question came as a surprise. Sean? Violent? The thought was so foreign.

  “No! Of course not. He was furious with me but he would never have hurt me.”

  “But he was angry, you say. So, he left because he was angry with you? It might help if we understood why he left. Why was he angry?”

  How to tell these strangers what she had done? Suzan wished she could go back in time and choose a different path but some things can never be undone. It had been her fault Sean left her; she knew that with a keen certainty. Maybe ultimately it had been her fault he died. What did she know?

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I’m sure it must be,” said Paula. “Still, if we understood why he went to Seattle . . .”

  “I don’t have any idea why he went to Seattle. As far as I know he didn’t know anyone there,” said Suzan. “But if I tell you a little about him . . . about us. Maybe that will help y
ou, maybe not. We met in junior high when my family moved to Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island. Dad was stationed there with the Navy. Sean was the first person who talked to me when I started school there. He made friends with everyone.” She realized she was babbling. “I’m sorry, you aren’t interested in all that.”

  Paula leaned forward. “That’s okay, Suzan, I know this is hard for you. Just take your time. There’s no telling what will help.”

  Suzan realized she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled, asking her shoulders to relax away from her ears.

  “Sean sang and played guitar with a band even then, literally a garage band. Just a bunch of kids jamming in his friend Tony’s garage. I think Sean was the only one who took it seriously,” she said. “Sean and I dated through high school, then when we decided to go to college together here in Bellingham we got married. It seemed like a great idea at the time. Romantic, impulsive. You know how it goes.”

  “Suzan, you said that the year before he left, Sean’s behavior changed. In what way did it change?” asked Paula.

  “I didn’t notice anything at first. Sean was working on a combined major in writing and music on full scholarship. He was also playing in a band on weekends to help pay for school. I know he was tired,” she said. “I know it sounds . . . well, strange but we didn’t see a lot of each other. I was up to my ears in my own work. I was wrapping up my junior year in art and starting to think about grad school so I was on campus a lot.”

  “Was this when he started using drugs?”

  “I guess so. I don’t really know,” she said. “I suppose I should have seen it. There must have been signs but I wasn’t around very much. No, I guess I didn’t want to know anything was wrong.”