So Mrs. Cosgrove hadn’t spent much time waiting around for her missing husband to show up or playing the grieving widow. If they’d finally gone to the formality of having her former husband officially declared dead, it seemed to me as though someone in the world of officialdom should have noticed the transaction and removed Anthony Cosgrove’s name from the list of officially missing persons.
DeAnn apparently read my mind about her mother’s unseemly matrimonial haste. “Mom and Jack got married in January of the following year,” she said. “I don’t like the man much—never have. He’s an overbearing jerk. And we had our issues, especially when I was a teenager. That’s why I ended up living with my grandmother—my father’s mother—down in Kent most of the time I was in high school. But by then there was money coming in from Social Security, so it didn’t seem like I was a burden.”
“But you said there was insurance?”
DeAnn nodded. “Quite a bit,” she said. “Some of it was group insurance and the rest of it was stuff Daddy owned. There was one smaller policy that was just for me. Donnie and I used that to make the down payment on this house.”
Insurance proceeds are often the motivator in homicide cases, but not in this one. A payout accompanied by a seven-year delay seemed unlikely, but it was still worth checking into.
“What’s your mother’s name?” I asked.
“Lawrence,” DeAnn answered. “Carol Lawrence. And her husband is Jack. Like I said, they live up in Leavenworth now. If you want to talk to them, I can get you the phone number, but I don’t see that it’ll do much good. I doubt they could tell you any more about what happened than I can.”
I made a note of their names anyway. I didn’t bother taking down the phone number. I knew if I needed to reach them I’d be able to locate Jack and Carol Lawrence’s phone number—listed or not.
I was about to put my notebook away, but then I looked at DeAnn Cosgrove and could see she wasn’t done talking. Maybe after years of not talking about it, she was ready.
“Anything else you can tell me about your dad?” I asked.
“I was always surprised that he went fishing that weekend,” she said. “As far as I know, he hadn’t ever gone before. He didn’t even like fish that much. What he liked were airplanes. He loved airplanes.”
“You mean as a hobby?”
“As in every way. That’s what he did, you see. He worked for Boeing, too, designing airplanes. I’m not really sure what he did there. I wish now I’d been older so I could have known which planes he worked on and what he did. Maybe I’ve ridden on one of the ones he helped design.”
“You probably have,” I said.
“I hope so,” she replied. I put the notebook in my jacket pocket. “So what happens now?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I may check with the people down at Mount Saint Helens and make sure that they haven’t learned something we don’t know about. And I may want to speak to your mother as well. What about your grandmother, the one who lived in Kent?”
“Grandma died last year,” DeAnn said. “Daddy was her only son, just like I’m my father’s only child. That’s the other reason I’m glad we kept my name. Grandma made me promise that I’d keep her ashes so that if they ever found my father, he and she could be buried together. She’s out in the garage,” she added. “Up in the rafters.”
When I stood up to go, DeAnn expertly eased the two sleeping kiddos off her lap without disturbing either one of them. Then she rose from the floor with an easy grace that my gimpy knees could never have tolerated.
“Thanks,” she said as she showed me to the door. “And please tell your boss thank you for me, too. It means a lot to know that someone still cares about my father after all this time—that someone’s still looking for him. It means more than you know.”
The last thing I did before I left was to hand her a business card. “This is how you can reach me,” I said, jotting my cell number on the back. “That way, if you happen to think of something you may have forgotten…”
“Okay,” she said, stuffing it into the pocket of her jeans. “Thanks.”
As I walked back to the Mercedes parked just outside the small front yard with its plastic Big Wheels and swings, I had a whole new idea about that daunting list of missing persons. Every single one of them had left behind family members for whom life had gone on. There were children and grandchildren who had never seen those missing people. There were parents who had died with their child still lost to them. And there were spouses who had been forced to move forward on their own, making the best of the hand they’d been dealt.
Everybody at SHIT had sneered when Ross had announced his missing persons directive, but having met DeAnn Cosgrove and witnessed her pain, I could see that this was a situation where the attorney general was right and everybody else was wrong.
CHAPTER 3