marrying me, not his father.”
It was clear that almost twenty-five years later, DeAnn Cosgrove was still grieving for her absent father and hoping against hope that someday he would return. That kernel of knowledge was enough to break my heart. It put a personal human spin on an assignment that had been, up to that point, nothing but a list of names.
“Sounds like your husband’s got a good head on his shoulders,” I said.
An odd expression flitted across DeAnn’s face. “Yes,” she agreed finally. “Yes, he does. But you still haven’t told me. What’s this about? Why are you asking questions about Dad after so many years?”
“It turns out there are literally hundreds of unresolved missing persons cases in this state that have gotten zero attention…”
“Tell me about it,” she said.
“I work for the Washington State attorney general, Ross Connors. He’s asked my agency, the Special Homicide Investigation Team, to go through those cases and see if by cross-checking we can bring some of them to a close.”
“I’ve heard about cases like that,” DeAnn offered. “Cold cases where they eventually figure out that an unidentified body somewhere else is someone who’s been missing for a long time.”
“Yes, so if you don’t mind…”
But I didn’t even finish asking the question before DeAnn Cosgrove launched into her story. “It happened the day Mount Saint Helens blew up,” she said at once. “Daddy went fishing that weekend and never came home.”
The day Mount Saint Helens blew up. If you lived in Washington State or even anywhere in the Pacific Northwest at the time, those words conjure a day you remember-a beautifully clear Sunday morning in late spring when the mountain-one some Native Americans referred to as “Louwala Clough,” or Smoking Mountain-suddenly roared back to life after being quiet for 123 years. The initial blast caused a huge avalanche and sent up an immense overheated cloud of three-hundred-degree pumice and ash that killed every living thing inside a two- hundred-square-mile area.
“So your father was one of the fifty or so people who died?” I asked.
“The actual number was fifty-seven,” she said. “Daddy wasn’t ever counted in that official number because they never found any trace of him-no sign of him or his vehicle. But Mount Saint Helens is where he had told my mother he was going that weekend-he said he was going fishing on Spirit Lake.”
I had gone camping on the edge of that pristine lake myself years ago-long before the mountain blew up. In advance of the actual eruption-between the time of the first sizable earthquake underneath the mountain in March and when the first big eruption happened on the eighteenth of May-I remembered reading about a curmudgeonly old guy-memorably named Harry Truman-who had told interviewers that if the mountain ever exploded, he’d just go out on the lake in his boat and wait it out. There was only one problem with Mr. Truman’s plan-the lake was vaporized in that initial explosion, and so was he.
It seemed likely to me now that if Anthony David Cosgrove had been anywhere near Spirit Lake at the time, he had most likely met a similar fate. But I remembered, too, that investigators had found traces of many of the human tragedies left behind in the volcano’s aftermath. Etched in my memory were images of eerie shells of burned-out vehicles still smoldering in the devastated wilderness and testifying to the fact that for the people trapped inside those vehicles, there had been no escape.
In the decades since then, though, Mount Saint Helens and the surrounding area have been subjected to an almost microscopic examination as scientists study both what happened back then and what’s happening now. The area where millions of board feet of timber were felled in one cataclysmic blast is now an ongoing laboratory of Mother Nature at work, reclaiming that which she has previously destroyed.
With that in mind, it seemed strange to me that no fragment of Anthony Cosgrove’s vehicle had ever been found. Still, there was always an outside chance that something had surfaced and no one had bothered to notify his daughter. Bureaucracies are notoriously dim when it comes to taking the feelings of individuals into consideration.
By then the baby seemed to have fallen asleep. She held him to her shoulder, burped him, and then went to put him down somewhere out of sight. The process made me wonder a little. I knew that Kelly had nursed Kayla when she was a baby. Kyle, on the other hand, seemed to be a bottle baby. When we had been down in Ashland, I had noticed this and wondered about it, but there are things fathers can ask and things they can’t. This was one of the latter.
When DeAnn returned to the living room, she brought with her a small gold-framed photo of a young man wearing a vintage 1970s hairdo and equally dated horn-rimmed glasses. Grinning goofily for the camera, he held a tiny, red-faced, wrinkly baby-held her awkwardly and carefully, as though he was concerned she might break.
It was one of those standard set-piece types of photos that are part of most families. They’re usually trite, poorly lit, and unoriginal, but they’re wonderful all the same. They testify to the fact that no matter what may happen later-death or divorce, midnight arrests for shoplifting or wrecked first cars-at that point in time, that newly arrived child was a joyfully welcomed addition to his or her family.
“Your dad?” I asked, handing the photo back to DeAnn.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s the only one I have. After he was gone, Mom went through the house and got rid of most of his pictures. This is one my grandmother happened to have.”
She put the treasured photo up on the mantel, settled cross-legged on the floor, and then gathered her rambunctious twins to her as if finding solace in their wiggly presence. Having corralled their toys into the toy box, spurred on by an amazing combination of motherly prodding and patience, they now cuddled up next to their mother on the carpeted floor. With their heads in her lap and their feet sticking out in opposite directions, they gradually settled down. One of them clutched the tattered corner of a faded yellow blanket while the other industriously sucked his thumb.
Waiting for them to drift off, I tried to remember if Scott and Kelly used to do that when they were little-just fall over and go to sleep like that, regardless of where they were or what was going on-but I didn’t have a single memory I could focus in on. At the time, I wasn’t that kind of a father. Driven, intent on earning enough money to support them and also intent on drinking too much, I had recklessly squandered my own children’s childhoods. It’s something I’ve come to regret every day of my life.
“How old were you when it happened?” I asked.
“When my father went missing? I was eight,” DeAnn answered. “Old enough to be scared. It was bad enough that my father had disappeared into that awful place and didn’t come back. I saw all those terrible pictures on TV. I kept worrying that if one mountain could blow up like that, maybe the others would, too. I mean, we were living in Kent back then. Whenever the sun was shining, Mount Rainier was right there with us. At least, that’s how it seemed.”
Karen and I had been living down by Lake Tapps when the mountain blew. It had felt the same way to me, too. If God decided to send an overheated avalanche of rock and ash roaring down a mountainside at 150 miles per hour, Mount Rainier was way too close for comfort. It didn’t seem as if there would be nearly enough time to get out of the way.
“Since they never found any sign of him, I assume your father stayed on the missing list-permanently.”
DeAnn nodded again. “That’s right. I’ve always thought it would have been easier for me if we’d at least found something of him to bury. Maybe then I could have gotten over it and moved on. My mother did. She was impatient. She didn’t bother waiting around seven years to have him declared dead. She divorced him, remarried, and made a whole new life for herself, but I just couldn’t. They did declare him dead eventually, but it didn’t change anything.”
She paused while tears welled in her eyes. She pursed her lips. “He called me his princess,” she added brokenly, all the while struggling to control her emotions. “He said that one day I’d be carried away by a prince on a white horse. My mother told me Dad was just being silly and making those things up. Donnie’s a lot like him. Tells the kids stories. And he’s an engineer, too. No pocket protector, though.”
Until right then I had been doing the job Ross Connors asked me to do, but I don’t think I had really believed in it. As far as I and the rest of the SHIT squad were concerned, Ross Connors’s “missing persons thing” had us off on a harebrained tangent that didn’t make a whole lot of sense and wasn’t worth either our time or our energy. But in talking to DeAnn Cosgrove I could see that the effort was making sense to her.
“So what happened after the report was filed?” I asked.
DeAnn shrugged. “Not much,” she said. “At least not as far as I was concerned. Everyone was too worried
