The Dog Collar Murders (19 page)

“Old memories,” I said. That seemed innocuous enough. After all, didn’t everybody have old memories?

“I see,” Clea nodded. “Well, it depends on you really. I’m not a traditional therapist, you know, though we will do lot of talking too. I use healing stones, a little aromatherapy, some dreamwork. I don’t think of myself as a therapist, more as a psychic guide. So there are a number of things we can do. We can make art, write, dance…”

I coughed slightly.

“Does something amuse you?” she asked.

“Oh—I guess I’ve just never heard of dancing therapy.”

“It can be a very healing experience to get in touch with your creative, spiritual self,” she reprimanded me.

“Look, Clea, I should say I’m here because I heard you at the sexuality conference talking about having been into S/M and I wanted to know more about it.”

From the look in her eyes I thought she was going to blast me out of the water, but suddenly she grew kind again. “You want to get out too, is that it?”

“Well…”

“I guess I’ve been learning a lot this week about coming out as a former sadomasochist,” she said. “Maybe that’s going to be part of my work as a therapist. Up until recently I haven’t been able to talk about it. But I found it really painful to hear Nicky and Oak saying things I
know
aren’t true.”

Clea tucked her knees under her and touched the calico bag hanging around her neck. “I grew up expecting sex to be rough and liking to be dominated. Those were the first fantasies I had. I’d had fantasies like that with men, but I struggled—successfully—against acting on them. I finally got into S/M with a woman lover back in the late seventies, early eighties when everybody was talking about it and saying how great it was. Some of my friends came out as masochists or sadists, and my lover admitted that she’d always wanted to take our sexuality a little further. She already was pretty dominant in bed, always on top and taking the lead, but we’d never talked openly about it, never used any toys.

“We started out with scarves and dildos, but before six months was up we were hardcore. We spent hundreds of dollars on props for our scenes and pretty soon all our free time was taken up with this new form of entertainment. The physical pain seemed pretty minimal, I remember laughing sometimes thinking how people focused on that all the time, as if that were really the point of S/M. But S/M was a total consciousness, it wasn’t just confined to the physical, it got into all aspects of my relationship with my lover. At first verbal humiliation was a turn-on, later on it got to be constant and more and more degrading.

“I know that some proponents of S/M talk about trading roles back and forth, but we never did, and none of our friends did. We were stuck in our roles, addicted to our roles. There was so much intensity in it that it was hard to go back to so-called vanilla sex. But the violence kept escalating. What I finally had to realize was that I was in an abusive relationship—my lover was a batterer and S/M enabled her to batter and feel good about it.

“When I look back on the experience I see that I was trying to work out a whole series of things that happened to me in my childhood, when I was neglected, humiliated and beaten. The S/M ritual seemed like a way of working out some of that repressed pain, transforming it into something that I chose freely and could control. Other women have talked about S/M as a healing experience or a way of dealing with the emotional S/M in our lives. I can’t believe that I ever agreed.”

Clea stopped and fingered her rose quartz necklace. “I understand now that you can never heal through violence; you have to love yourself and accept yourself. Reenacting scenarios compulsively isn’t cathartic, it’s harmful. Very, very harmful.”

“That’s what I’m starting to think,” I said. “Now that Loie Marsh and Nicky Kay have both been choked by dog collars.”

“But Loie Marsh wasn’t into S/M!” Clea was shocked.

“How do you know?”

“Aside from the fact that everything she said spoke against the sadomasochistic mentality, I would have known about it. The S/M network is very connected. She could never have kept that quiet.”

“That makes me feel better,” I said.

“I’ve told you my story,” said Clea encouragingly. “Are you ready to talk about yours?”

I got up. “No, uh, not yet,” I said. “But thanks so much for telling me what you told me. It really helped. Really.”

“I’ll get used to talking about it,” said Clea, walking me to the door, “I know I’ll get used to it.”

I paid her, left and thought it interesting that she didn’t dispute that Nicky had been found with a dog collar around her neck, even though the papers had never mentioned it.

My excuse to Edith Marsh was on the weak side: “I’m sorry that my sister and I just ran out like that after the service. So today I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d just stop in. I hope it’s all right. I guess, my parents being Norwegian and all….” I held out a lemon pound cake I’d picked up at Larsen’s Bakery.

Edith looked surprised and then so pleased that I almost left right then with a guilty conscience. But she quickly invited me inside and said we must have some cake and coffee.

“Nilsen,” she said. “Was that Arne Nilsen’s hardware in Ballard?”

“That was my grandfather,” I admitted. “My father and mother had a print shop downtown. Sig and Louise Nilsen.”

“I knew a Sig once,” she said. “But he was killed… Oh,” Edith said. “Of course. You poor dear.”

She brought me into the living room, filled with the usual pine furniture and woven runner mats. It was cozier than Hanna’s house and more expensive.

“Mother,” said Edith. “Here’s that nice Pam Nilsen from Loie’s funeral. She’s brought us some lemon pound cake and her father was Sig Nilsen, Arne Nilsen’s boy, remember Arne’s hardware store, on Market Street?”

Mrs. Sandbakker said of course she did and she launched into an amazing litany of unfamiliar and half-remembered names, while Edith went off to make coffee.

When she returned I mentioned that I’d come straight from work and hoped I wasn’t interrupting their dinner hour.

“Oh no,” said Edith. “We always eat early, so this is dessert for us. I only work until three, usually. I’m the administrator for a small nursing home. Of course today I didn’t go in at all… it was quite a shock.”

“It must have been a terrible shock,” I agreed.

“Oh, it was. It was.” Though she didn’t look particularly shocked as she poured out coffee. Perhaps that came from being in nursing or in administration. “The worst has been the reporters. They’re paying more interest now than when Loie was killed. At first I wasn’t going to open the door to you. I thought you might be that awful woman from
USA Today
who’s been lurking around.”

“You don’t think there’s been any mistake then? That Pauline could have done it?”

“My dear, how could the police make a mistake? It’s very clear that that woman murdered my daughter and then tried to steal her book.”

I felt a little disturbed by Mrs. Marsh’s detached tone. Last week driving away from the memorial service she had been certain that Loie was a victim of random violence. Was it so easy to give that theory up and accept that your daughter had been murdered by her ex-lover?

“One thing I don’t quite understand,” I said. “You said you called Pauline at home Saturday night after the murder. In Boston.”

Edith’s large face flushed. “That was a misunderstanding,” she said. “I tried to call her, but couldn’t get through. Hanna was the one who left a message on Pauline’s machine. Of course Pauline didn’t get it. She was already here.”

“You don’t think it could have been anyone else, do you? Her ex-husband? Someone she knew from the past?”

I felt that Mrs. Sandbakker had gone quite still and was observing me closely, but Edith Marsh exclaimed,

“David? What a ridiculous idea. Loie ran his life while they were married and now Sonya runs it. He’s not a strong man, David, not like Loie’s father.”

“Did they meet in college?”

“Yes, they did. David was three years younger than Loie. That was a mistake, from the start. Why would a twenty-three year old girl marry a man so much younger? I always thought that was the root of the problem. For instance if he’d married Hanna. They were the same age and at the time they had the same interests—acting and politics. But he married Loie—she was a beautiful girl then, not quite so big as she later became.”

“Loie took him away from Hanna,” Mrs. Sandbakker said. I had the uneasy feeling that she saw straight through me, but that for some reason she was encouraging me. It couldn’t be because of Grandpa Arne, so why was it?

“Mother! That’s ridiculous. No, David is obviously drawn to strong women. Hanna is strong, but she’s also weak. And of course now they wouldn’t agree about politics at all. Yes, David was drawn to Loie for her strength. As for Loie, I don’t know what the attraction was, since we now know she wasn’t interested in men at all.”

“She wanted to punish Hanna,” Mrs. Sandbakker said stubbornly.

Edith Marsh’s carmine lips set in a thin line. “You and Erik have always taken Hanna’s side in everything.”

“Someone had to. Loie was always such a pushy child.”

The two women glared at each other. I said, as innocently as possible, “I keep wondering if the death of that woman Nicky Kay had anything to do with Loie’s murder. Someone told me that Nicky and Hanna were roommates in college.”

“Now there’s another story!” Mrs. Marsh burst out. “When I was growing up, you went to school, got married and had children. If you were smart you got some training to fall back on if anything happened, like I did as a nurse. Girls these days are so different. Now Nicky was a perfectly lovely girl, she grew up in Wenatchee and she had never been to Seattle before she came to the University of Washington. Hanna often brought her by to have dinner that first year when they were freshmen. And then you come to find out that all these years she’s been working as a… as a prostitute.”

Edith hadn’t answered my question. I didn’t know if that was intentional. I did know that I’d just had two cups of coffee and should be making leaving movements.

I began to gather myself together and said as casually as possible, “Well, I hope the publicity around Loie and Pauline isn’t too awful for you. If Pauline talks to reporters I’d be worried what she would say. She seems a little out of control to me.”

“I should say!” said Mrs. Marsh. “Did you see the way she behaved at the memorial service? She wasn’t even polite.”

“You could hardly expect politeness from a murderess,” said Mrs. Sandbakker. I looked at her quickly; her tone had been almost ironic.

I got up. “Thank you so much for coffee, Mrs. Marsh. I really should be going… I hope Hanna is feeling better, now that they know who did it. She seemed so upset after the memorial service, when you reminded her about Loie saving her life.”

I didn’t know why but Edith Marsh suddenly looked angry and impatient. “Well, that’s just Hanna,” she said brusquely. “Always over-emotional about things.”

They came with me to the door and we ended our visit back at Arne Nilsen and the days when belonging to the Sons of Norway had really
meant
something.

I hoped our shared Scandinavian heritage would keep me in their good graces and that they wouldn’t think too hard about the meaning of my visit.

Though I suspect that Mrs. Sandbakker, at least, already had.

It was only six-thirty and I knew that Hadley wouldn’t be home yet, so I decided to stop off at the university and see if I could find out anything more about the college careers of Loie, Hanna, Nicky and David. I decided I’d look through back issues of the
Daily
, the University of Washington newspaper, from the one year when they’d all been at the university together.

In Suzzallo library I microfiched forward and back, feeling at times a little sting of jealousy. I was sorry not to have been part of the student movement in its prime. Students were still demonstrating by the time Penny and I arrived at the university, but it was all getting a little passé.

All of a sudden I stopped. There was a photo of Hanna Sandbakker, looking incredibly young, her hair falling straight and blond from a center part, her lips pale and her eyes dark in the fashion of the day. She had just appeared in a production at the Glen Hughes Playhouse of
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
as Evie Warren. It was her debut performance, the glowing review said, and she had completely eclipsed all the other players. I looked at the end of the review to see what other actors were mentioned. “Loie Marsh was adequate as Mrs. Warren, but her tendency to overact was even more apparent next to Hanna Sandbakker’s freshness and originality.”

So Loie had acted too. No one had mentioned that before. I spun the dial forward looking for reviews of other plays that winter and spring. There was Hanna Sandbakker’s name, over and over, the fledging drama critics predicting a glorious acting career for her. There was no further mention of Loie Marsh. Had her acting been a transitory thing then? She’d ended up teaching drama in a Kirkland high school, but that was what you did if you had a drama degree and couldn’t make it in the theater. I searched the reviews for other names I recognized, and there, in a review of
Hedda Gabler
I found David Gustafson as Tesman. “Captures the part of the well-meaning husband perfectly.” Also making her first appearance on the stage was Sonya Rees as Thea Elvsted. I wondered if it was the same Sonya that David had eventually married. It must be. She’d said she’d known them all slightly back then.

My eyes were beginning to ache, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to turn back another year and see if Loie had appeared in any other plays. I found her name mentioned in two productions. The reviews were kind, rather than spectacular. Still, they weren’t completely discouraging, not for someone who really wanted to believe she could act. They weren’t like the damning comparison with Hanna in
Mrs. Warren’s Profession.

I was starting to put some things together. There were ties among these people that went back years, and yet none of them now seemed to like each other or to have remained in contact. Nicky had been Hanna’s roommate, but had gone off in a completely different direction. Hanna had humiliated Loie and her dreams of acting, and Loie, to get back at her, had married David, the man Hanna loved—according to Mrs. Sandbakker at least. Sonya seemed to have played a fairly peripheral part—still, you never knew.