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“Yes, Papa,” she chided back ruefully. “I’ll be good. Or at least I’ll try.”
Doris appeared beside the table with a coffeepot and a plate of pancakes for Bruce.
“Coffee today, Greta, or decaf?”
“Better make it caffeine today. Bruce is in a feisty mood, so I need to stay alert.”
“Hah! He’s always in a feisty mood.”
Bruce grimaced. “Don’t you women know that being feisty is correlated with a longer life and better health? Shows you still got plenty of vim and vigor.”
“I don’t know if that’s your problem,” retorted Doris. “On the other hand, you have stopped trying to hit on me.”
“I haven’t stopped. I’m just giving it a break to surprise you sometime.”
He had never tried to hit on Doris. She was happily married and a close friend of his wife’s before she’d passed away two years before.
“And better make it oatmeal and yogurt today,” Greta said. Her splurge of sourdough, cheese, and wine last night needed balance.
Doris walked away, and Bruce eyed Greta.
“So . . . any sharing of information about the case, or am I excluded now that I’m retired?”
“I think I can trust you not to pass anything on to the media,” she said, teasing.
She laughed to herself. Fat chance, given Bruce’s opinion of reporters.
She gave a ten-minute overview of what she knew. By the time she’d finished, he was halfway through his stack of pancakes, and her order had arrived.
“Seems like you’ve got several avenues to look into. In a way, that’s unfortunate. It’s better to have one obvious major thread to follow, at least at first.”
“How many murder cases did you get involved in?”
“Here in Oregon, three in my thirty years. That’s three in which I was part of the investigation. There were a few others, though I wasn’t directly involved, except for some support. Nothing too complex. One was a straight drug deal gone bad. One druggie tried to rip off another and got stabbed half a dozen times. Another case was a stalking ex-husband who killed his wife while we were waiting for the legal system to get around to issuing a stay-away order. That one still sticks in my craw. The third one we never solved. A sixteen-year-old Tillamook boy was found strangled on the beach outside Garibaldi. No other signs of violence, no suspects, no obvious enemies . . . nothing. That one scared us, wondering if it was some kind of psycho serial killer. But time passed without any similar cases. I know it’s hard, yet you’ll have to accept there will always be those cases, ones you never solve, and learn to live with it.”
He stopped speaking and stirred his coffee. Greta recognized him gathering his thoughts.
“Of course . . . here was nothing like Philadelphia.”
She set her coffee down. “Philadelphia? I knew you were from the East. So, the Philadelphia PD? Is that where you’re from originally?” Greta realized almost everything she knew about Bruce was connected to Tillamook County.
“Maryland, actually. Queenstown, on the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay. A small nothing little town only a few miles from the bridge over toward Annapolis, and not far north to Baltimore and south to Washington. I suspect that growing up in Queenstown, since it was small and near the water, eventually affected my ending up here. Anyway, I worked on the Philadelphia force for ten years. Five years on patrol and five years in homicide. We must have had a dozen open cases at any one time, year after year. It finally got to me. Not just the brutality of it all, but the feeling of futility at so many cases, with no end to them. That was it for me. By then, Martha and I had the three kids; the oldest was nine. We decided we needed to move on and find a quieter life.”
“Why here?” Greta asked, curious. This was the first time he’d mentioned anything about his life before Tillamook, and she wondered why she hadn’t learned more of his past before this.
Am I too absorbed in myself? she briefly wondered.
He smiled warmly at her. “Not too different from your case. Lots of applications to all over the country, lots of interest, and then settling here for an odd reason. Martha’s a nut for Civil War history. Not the battles or politics, but accounts of the average person not directly involved, like the wives, the too old or yo
ung, too infirm, some Quakers, even conscription evaders. The general picture of what the country was like if you weren’t in the battles themselves.”
“Then why here? Why not back in New England or somewhere closer to where it happened?”
“I was pretty set on getting away from the East to somewhere different. While Martha looked through job listings, she found one with the Lincoln City Police Department, Lincoln County, Oregon. She got it into her mind it was fate and where we were meant to be. You know, Lincoln County . . . Abe Lincoln. I applied but never even got a return acknowledgment. After a couple of weeks, she found another opening in the next county with the Tillamook Sheriff’s Department. We sent an application and within three days got a call that the job was mine if I wanted. By then, I was antsy to make a move, and Martha was even more convinced about fate. We accepted the job, and I’ve never regretted it.”
He grinned and shook his head. “Well, let me say I’ve never regretted the move itself, although, as with anything, there are always details that could be different.”
Greta knew, by now, that one of those “details” referred to Sheriff Wallace. Bruce made no bones about his unhappiness when Wallace was elected sheriff eight years earlier and replaced the retiring previous sheriff, whom Bruce had worked well with and respected.
