The letter arrived on a Tuesday afternoon at Paramount Drug, a family-owned pharmacy in downtown Astoria.

Even now, five months later, no one knows how many other letters just like it – all of them signed – were mailed.

They turned up first in Astoria, then across the Columbia River in Oysterville, a small community on Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula. Letters later surfaced in Portland and down the Oregon coast.

It was the one at the pharmacy that set everything in motion, leading to the discovery of the two bodies.

The discovery of what it all meant will take more time.

****

Marsha Ettro works at Paramount Drug Co. with her sister, Eileen, a pharmacy technician married to pharmacist Ed Treharne Jr.

On this Tuesday, Feb. 6, she was sorting through the mail – mostly advertising flyers and customer payments – when a white envelope caught her eye. Handwritten in black ink, it read Marsha, Eileen + Ed.

Ettro opened it and pulled out two lined pages from a yellow legal pad. She recognized the handwriting, in pencil, as belonging to Petra Mathers, one of the store’s most loyal customers.

Petra, 78, and her 79-year-old husband, Michael Mathers, were locals with national reputations. She was a children’s book author and illustrator. He was a versatile photographer. They visited the store for prescriptions, but they often lingered, buying a small box of candy or reminiscing about the 1950s music always playing on the store’s sound system.

“Dear Paramount,” the letter began, then continued:

When Michael and I got together some 40 plus years ago, we’d always planned on checking out together when the time comes. It did, and our resting place is in the graveyard in Oysterville, always a favorite destination for a fair-weather outing. Come see us some time, quiet, beautiful old trees, you can even hear the ocean sometimes. We’ve had a great run.

The letter closed with Petra thanking the pharmacy’s staff for their care, and then: “See you sometime somewhere.” She signed her first name.

Next to her signature, Michael had signed his first name in pen. He added a final thought: I hope they are playing 50s music where we go.

Ettro carried the letter to the back of the pharmacy to show Treharne.

The pharmacist didn’t know what to make of it.

“We agreed Marsha should drive to their house,” he said. “They live close by. We didn’t know if it was a prank. Maybe they were up there having a glass of wine and laughing.”

Ettro arrived at the Mathers’ home and noticed nothing unusual. When no one answered the doorbell, she walked around the yard, peering in windows.

She returned to the pharmacy and filled in her sister and brother-in-law. Treharne began calling the Mathers’ home, leaving multiple messages on their answering machine. Finally, he phoned the Astoria Police Department.

“I said we got this weird letter,” Treharne recalled. “We wanted an officer to come down and look at it.”

Officer Cory Gerig showed up. After reading the letter, he climbed back into his patrol car and headed up a steep hill to the Mathers’ home on Ridge Drive.

No one answered the door. But he discovered that the garage was unlocked. He called for backup. When the second officer arrived, they entered the garage.

Gerig found a key hanging on a hook. He tried it on the door leading to the house, and it turned in the lock. The two cops stepped through the door.

Decorated with original paintings and elegant, understated furniture, the place looked like it belonged in House Beautiful magazine.

The two men called out, identifying themselves as police officers and announcing they were there to see if the couple needed help.

They continued to call out as they made their way through the house.

Gerig walked into the couple’s bedroom.

He stopped.

Petra Mathers was lying on a small sofa. Michael Mathers was nearby, slumped over in a chair.

Gerig found a handwritten note:

Dear police, we apologize for this unpleasant task, but since we want to quietly die together at home, this seemed the only solution.

Gerig, a U.S. Army combat veteran who served in Iraq, studied this scene with a practiced eye.

Petra Mathers, in casual clothes, appeared to have died first. On the floor, next to a chair, was a clear plastic bag. Petra’s husband, Gerig surmised, had verified she was dead and then carefully placed her body on the sofa.

Michael Mathers also was fully dressed. He had a plastic bag over his head. Tubes ran from the bag to a canister with pressure regulators and a label identifying it as compressed nitrogen.

Gerig got on his police radio.

Detectives, the medical examiner and the police department’s deputy chief, Eric Halverson, soon arrived.

The house was searched, evidence collected, photographs taken.

Police found contact information for a local mortuary and for the pet-boarding place where the couple’s beloved cats had been lodged. There also was the name and telephone number for a Portland woman the Mathers said was the executor of their estate.

The officers didn’t know it yet, but a letter was on its way to the Astoria Police Department.

In that letter, the couple asked police not to use lights or sirens on their way to the house. They didn’t want to disturb the neighbors. They also mentioned the key in the garage so officers wouldn’t have to break in.

After it was clear the couple had not been murdered, officials removed the bodies from the house. Police then phoned Patty Flynn, the estate’s executor, in Portland to tell her the grim news.

“Shocked is not the right word,” said Flynn, who had known the couple for more than 40 years. She couldn’t believe it. Petra and Michael had appeared healthy and happy.

Flynn, who had a key to the Mathers’ home, set out for Astoria, where she discovered it was indeed true. Her dear friends were dead. They had taken their own lives.

The case soon would be officially closed.

But those who knew – and loved – Petra Mathers and Michael Mathers didn’t have closure.

Had there been clues, they wondered, that the couple was going to do this?

Why’d they do it?

Halverson, Astoria police’s deputy chief, had questions, too.

“During my career, I’ve seen hundreds of deaths,” he said. “Accidents, murders, suicides. I’ve never seen anything play out the way this did.”

He didn’t expect to come up with any answers for this one.

“I just write down the facts of what happened,” the police officer said. “I’ll leave the meaning of it all for others to discover.”

***

Petra and Michael Mathers could come across as opposites – Petra with her proper manners and inward gaze, Michael with a wildness in his eyes and a love of provocation. But they meshed perfectly.

“They were fun,” recalled Sydney Stevens, a longtime friend, noting they each had a dry sense of humor.

The couple traveled a lot, trawled museums, did research for their respective professional projects. Always together.

They lived the way they would die – for each other.

When he was a young man, Michael Mathers surely didn’t expect that one day he’d become so dedicated to someone else. Unusually comfortable both in his own skin and with his own company, he planned to blaze a path he alone chose.

In his senior year of college, at Harvard University, he became obsessed with photography, with the ability to freeze a moment in time, perfect forever.

“I basically stopped going to school, and I just took pictures,” he said in a 2019 interview.

It wasn’t his only obsession.

Raised in a well-to-do family in New York City, Michael found himself drawn to society’s down-and-out denizens. He became fascinated by how easily they could turn a corner and vanish, never to be seen again. He lit out after them.

On his résumé, he proudly listed work as a ranch hand and a merchant mariner, a Shrine Circus roustabout and a dance instructor.

In the 1970s, right out of Harvard, he hopped train cars with “hoboes,” producing a small, photo-driven book about the experience. He later published portraits of sheepherders, more stoic men who believed they had little need for civilization and its rules.

“He was looking for things that were disappearing,” said his first wife, Andrea Carlisle, a Portland writer and editor.

And so, he found Astoria. Michael Mathers arrived before the town refashioned itself as a popular weekend destination, before the quaint hotels and small breweries and “The Goonies.”

He wasn’t attracted to what Astoria could become but what it was, its abandoned, rotting piers highlighting its lost eminence as America’s cannery. He homed in on the town’s remaining blue-collar residents.

“People who work with their bodies are grounded; they look like they belong there,” he once said, describing the inspiration for a series of photographs he made. “White collar workers don’t have that same groundedness.”

That unique sight – and insight – made his work stand out in the region, Carlisle told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

“I’m not going to call him a genius, because there are very few geniuses,” she said. “But he was a very important contributor to the documentation of the West.”

Carlisle met Michael Mathers in the 1970s after he’d come to Oregon.

Their marriage didn’t last long, but their friendship did. Carlisle said that, even after the union ended, she loved Michael “unconditionally.”

A few years after he and Carlisle split up, Michael Mathers met Petra Tollens.

This very American man – compulsively individualistic, a seeker, a little full of himself – fell hard for this very German woman.

There was something about her quietude, a sort of disciplined dreaminess, that gripped him.

Petra, meanwhile, was having her own, similar response.

“Petra told me that when they met, she fell head over heels for him,” said Stevens, who knew the couple for decades. “She said she just ached to be with him.”

Michael and Petra became inseparable, getting married in 1980.

Petra – born in a small German village in March 1945 as Allied troops coursed through the surrounding Black Forest on their way to Hitler’s Berlin – was unlike any woman Michael had known before.

When they met, she didn’t yet have an established artistic career like Michael – she was working in a bookstore. But her talent was undeniable.

She and her first husband had moved to Portland in the late 1960s, and then, after they broke up, she landed on the Oregon coast with her young son.

There, the self-taught painter had her debut exhibition, at Cannon Beach’s White Bird Gallery.

The first children’s book she both wrote and illustrated, 1985′s “Maria Theresa,” was about a hen that escapes her coop and discovers her true self on the streets of New York City. It won the Ezra Jack Keats Award, which heralds outstanding work by children’s book writers and illustrators early in their careers.

More awards – and a loyal readership – followed in the years to come, especially for her series featuring another adventurous chicken, Lottie, this one undeniably the author’s alter ego.

These books for little kids captured who she was, friends said. Thoughtful, even philosophical, but unpretentious.

Her final book, 2014′s “When Aunt Mattie Got Her Wings,” hinted at the author’s and her husband’s plans.

In the story, Lottie and her companion, a duck named Herbie, visit Lottie’s dying Aunt Mattie, who’s in the hospital. They later go to Mattie’s house and find a letter on a table.

“By the time you read this I will be dead, and I imagine you’re feeling a little down in the beak,” the letter says.

Lottie and Herbie sit at the table, dazed, bereft.

“Doesn’t it feel like Aunt Mattie should be here?” Herbie says.

“She is, Herbie,” Lottie replies. “In our hearts.”

***

Five months after their deaths, Petra and Michael Mathers remain in the hearts of their friends and family, but those they left behind aren’t as sanguine as Lottie and Herbie.

Carlisle, Michael’s first wife and a good friend of Petra’s, doesn’t want anyone thinking their decision to kill themselves was a grand “romantic gesture.”

“I believe there’s something darker at work in all of this,” she said.

She admitted she didn’t know what that was.

“Everybody’s saying, ‘Oh, well, you know, they did this out of their love for each other,’” she said. “I just think it’s more complicated than that. They’re very complicated people in a way.”

Oregon pioneered legal, medically assisted suicide – for people who are terminally ill and deemed capable of making health-care decisions for themselves. Not for healthy individuals who decide, for whatever reason, they want to die.

Not for people like Petra and Michael Mathers. As far as even their closest companions knew, the Mathers were physically robust and had received no dire medical diagnoses. It also appears they were financially secure, and they still were deeply in love and enjoyed their life together.

The Mathers’ friends find their decision to take their own lives, on their own, disturbing and abhorrent. Even a betrayal.

Life is precious. Why would they do such a thing?

Sydney Stevens recalled a mutual friend telling her long ago that Petra had once talked to her about suicide.

“Petra indicated it was Michael’s idea and Michael is always right, and that that was typical of their relationship,” Stevens said. “He was the one that had the ideas, always great, always upbeat, and Petra kind of went along.”

The rumors and reinterpretations, the fuzzy memories of conversations past, continue to swirl among those who knew the Mathers.

They were devoted to each other. Everyone knew that. It was touching. But could a couple be too devoted?

“It’s so confounding,” said Stevens, who received one of the signed letters from Petra and Michael. “It said, ‘This is goodbye. Michael and I want you to know how much we enjoyed all our times together.’ Very short. Over and out.”

Now, after this shock, Stevens wonders if she ever really knew Petra and Michael Mathers. It brought home that everyone, at the root of it all, is a mystery, to others and often to themselves as well.

Years ago, the Mathers asked Stevens if they could buy a plot in the Oysterville Cemetery, founded in 1858, one of the oldest in Washington state. Space is limited, and so the cemetery, managed by the Oysterville Cemetery Association, has a rule that plots are only for those who live or have lived in Oysterville.

Stevens, a cemetery association member, recommended to the board that the Mathers be allowed in because Petra’s books were centered in Oysterville. The board agreed.

The last time Stevens got together with the couple was shortly before Christmas, she recalled. The three of them went to lunch.

“They were exceptionally upbeat,” she said.

During the meal, Michael Mathers asked Stevens, a widow, if she’d seen his and Petra’s headstone in Oysterville Cemetery. Tall, with a curved top, the marker lists their names and the years they were born.

The most prominent feature is a large question mark carved into the stone.

“Michael asked me what I thought it meant,” said Stevens. “I said I didn’t know but told him I assumed it meant they did not know what comes next.

“They were delighted,” she said. “Michael said I was exactly right.”

Less than two months later, the couple killed themselves.

***

In the cold, late-winter days after the letter arrived at Paramount Drug and the Mathers’ bodies were discovered, Patty Flynn went through the house in Astoria, coming to terms with her new role as the estate’s executor.

In Michael Mathers’ office she found all of his photographs, carefully organized in 21 large binders.

They included many photographs of the couple.

“I took the first binder and saw them, so young and full of laughter. In the binders you follow their entire lives.”

On a small table leading out of the office, Flynn noticed a black-and-white portrait of Petra Mathers carefully ripped into four pieces.

Who ripped the photo?

When and why?

Why was it carefully left on that table?

Another mystery.

On her first evening at the house, the day after the bodies were discovered, Flynn recalled that Michael had once said he would leave her a bottle of scotch when he died.

“Michael loved his scotch,” she said. “He’d come to a dinner party and bring his own fine bottle and carry it under his arm.”

She looked around the house that night and found a box of The Macallan, a high-end single malt. Written in pencil on the box was a message: Sorry, broke into bottle last night.

Flynn stared at the message, thinking about it, her stomach dropping.

Also in the home, which to Flynn’s surprise Petra and Michael Mathers left to her, were instructions about what to do with their bodies.

It fell to her to organize the burial in the Oysterville cemetery.

April 6 was a windy, rainy day.

Seven people attended, including Petra’s adult son from her first marriage, who had been adopted as a teenager by Michael Mathers. It had been a difficult relationship between son and mother, and they had not seen each other for years.

“I am not sure where the divide happened,” Flynn said.

But the son – and his young son – were there at the cemetery.

Petra’s son dug the grave.

The remains were placed in the ground, then covered with dirt.

Those gathered, their shoulders hunched forward against the weather, stared at the headstone, at that large carved question mark, as the rain soaked them.

-- Tom Hallman Jr. is a reporter at The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach him at thallmanjr@gmail.com.

-- Douglas Perry is a reporter and editor at The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach him at 503-863-1679; dperry@oregonian.com.