Next of Kin

by L. F. Robertson

  “Did she move a lot, then?”

  “I guess. She always seemed to be in living in a different place depending on who her boyfriend was at the time. I think she was married a couple of times, too. The last one took, and she settled down. Her husband’s name is Pete Ottoboni, and they have a little house in Silver Lake.”

  “Did she have any more children?”

  “No, I was it. She wasn’t into motherhood, I guess.”

  “Did your grandparents have any other children?”

  “Sort of. There was a baby born before Linda, but my grandmother had German measles when she was pregnant, and the baby was born with some kind of birth defect and only lived a few months. Her name was Mary Alice. We used to go now and then to visit her grave and put flowers on it.”

  “And what was your life like, growing up?”

  “Ordinary, like I said. School, church, 4-H, sports, sometimes a concert. Hanging out with my friends. I had a good time in high school, got to be a cheerleader and prom queen, like Linda. She was proud of me, bought me a beautiful dress for the prom. Not that it was that big a deal.” Sunny let out another little laugh. “Sparksville High was very small. There were only about fifty kids in my senior class.”

  “So you graduated?”

  “Oh, yes. I wasn’t a superstar, but I didn’t get into cutting school or smoking weed like some of my friends, and my grades were okay.”

  Getting down to business, Carey asked her if she could remember the names of any of the kids in her class; after some thought, she listed a half-dozen. “I doubt that most of them are still around,” she said. “Most kids leave Sparksville when they get a chance.”

  “What did you do after graduating?”

  “Kept living with my grandparents. Went to work at an auto body shop in town. Ken, the owner, was a friend of Grandpa’s.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “I was the receptionist and answered the phones, and I helped with some of the billing and ordering. I was taking bookkeeping classes at the community college in Harrison in the evenings, so I could learn to do the books there. That’s where I met Troy—Britt’s father.”

  “At school?”

  “No, sorry—he worked at the shop.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Well, I fell in love with him. He was cute, kind of quiet and shy.”

  “How old was he?”

  “A year older than I was, so I guess nineteen when we met.”

  “And you got married?”

  “Yes. I’d been raised that that’s what you did. I was kind of old-fashioned, I guess; I believed in saving yourself for marriage. We were engaged for about six months, and then we got married in my grandparents’ church, at the end of our street, where I went all my life. We didn’t have money for a fancy wedding and reception, but I had a white dress and my bridesmaids wore pale blue, and Linda had a friend who was a florist, so she drove up with a carload of flowers in coolers, and we decorated the church. It was just gorgeous— and such a beautiful day. And we even had a honeymoon, a week in Maui. Imagine!” She sighed. “I can’t believe I was ever that girl.”

  “How long were you married?”

  Sunny knitted her brows, thinking back. “A little over two years. We separated—let me think—in 1985, when I was pregnant with Brittany, but the divorce wasn’t final until the end of 1986. Before Greg and I were married, anyway.”

  “Why did you break up?”

  She shrugged. “We were really in love at first, but I don’t think Troy was ready to be married. He kind of freaked out when I got pregnant with Brittany. Things got tense between us, and then I found out he was seeing another girl, someone he knew from high school in Harrison. We fought about it, and he moved out. It was awful because we were still working together. I needed the job, and no one else would hire me when I was pregnant, so I stayed until the baby was nearly due.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “It was a really hard time. We were renting an apartment in Harrison so it would be easier for me to go to school. I had to give it up and move back in with Nana and Grandpa until Brittany was old enough that I could go looking for work. When I found a job in Harrison, Nana said she and Grandpa could take care of Brittany, but I didn’t want to leave my baby like Linda left me. So I found another apartment and a babysitter for Brittany. It was tough. It was always like that old joke—‘too much month at the end of the money.’”

  “I haven’t heard that one,” Carey said, with a laugh.

  Sunny laughed, too. “It described my life to a T.”

  “What kind of work were you doing?” Carey asked.

  “Receptionist, a little bookkeeping—a lot like what I’d done at Ken’s, but for a chiropractor, Dr. Ostrander. That’s where I met Greg.”

  A guard knocked at the door. “Five minutes,” he mouthed through the glass.

  “They had to cut visiting short today,” Sunny said. “Some kind of inspection or something.”

  Before the guard came back, we gave Sunny some records releases to sign, and I asked her for contact information for Brittany. “I’ll call you,” she said. “She lives someplace called Wofford Heights. She says it’s east of Bakersfield. I never heard of it before she told me. Her married name is Ecker. Her husband is Rick, he’s a firefighter with Cal Fire. She used to be an EMT, but she’s taking time off while the kids are little. They’re doing well.”

  “I’m glad things have worked out for her.”

  Sunny nodded. “Me too. All this has been awfully hard for her. But she turned out really well. I’m proud of her.”

  The guard returned, and I told Sunny we’d be back in a couple of weeks. “We still have a lot of questions.”

  “I’ll be here.” Sunny’s smile broadened at the joke as she turned to go back to the cells.

  4

  Carey called me two days later, to say she’d made another appointment to see Sunny. “It’ll be the day before the hearing on the discovery motion,” she said, “so we can go from there to Harrison. I’ve arranged to see the trial exhibits afterward, and interview Craig Newhouse, Sunny’s trial lawyer, that afternoon.”

  “Man, you’re organized!”

  “I can’t help it; I’m constantly on edge about the timeline. Don’t tell Sunny, but I’m starting to wonder if we did the right thing, taking a case with such a short deadline. But I have an investigator on board, Natasha Levin. She worked with me not long ago on a Russian gang case. She’s an amazing young woman—fearless, and she speaks Russian. Not that we’ll need it on this case.”

  No, I thought, what we’ll need is someone whom a woman in her fifties can relate to and confide in about the dynamics of a long marriage going bad. I imagined Natasha as tall, classically good-looking, triumphant with youth—someone, in other words, whom I wouldn’t trust to take seriously the confidences of a middle-aged woman. Oh, come on, you haven’t even met her, I said to myself, and took a walk among my raised beds, with my dog Charlie in tow, to work off my attitude. There were lettuces growing up under row covers and sugarsnap peas climbing the cute purple trellis I’d bought from a garden supply catalog. Admiring them, I felt briefly like a modern pioneer woman, feeding my family of one from my garden—as long as I was willing to live only on greens.

  I had a couple of weeks of my quiet, reclusive life, work on my other cases punctuated with one or two shopping trips into town with my friend and gardening mentor Harriet: to the supermarket for groceries and the hardware store for the wire Harriet’s husband needed for the cage he was building to protect her blueberry bushes from voracious blue jays and raccoons. The urgency of the one-year deadline we were facing seemed to fade away; and it seemed too soon when I had to drop Charlie off with my neighbor Ed and pack to leave for the prison and Harrison.

  The drive to anywhere from where I lived started with a perilous stretch of road along the cliffs above the Pacific. After that, the route to the Central Valley town where the prison was ran thr
ough hills and farmland followed by many miles of urban freeway skirting the cities of the Bay Area and crossing the valley beyond.

  I started before daylight, because the urban stretch of my route was always a seemingly endless bumper-to-bumper crawl among other cars, menacing semis, and tanker trucks. By the time I reached the prison, I was a toxic mix of road-weary and jittery from the sour coffee and packaged Mexican pastries I’d picked up during a pit stop at a gas station market.

  The prison was the same, except that the bright day was warmer, though thankfully not yet the broiling summer of the valley. I arrived ahead of Carey, told the guards I was expecting my co-counsel, and settled down to read and yawn on one of the row of metal and plastic chairs in the waiting area. Natasha Levin was meeting us so that we could introduce her to Sunny. She arrived ten minutes after I did and caught my eye as I looked up to see who was coming through the door. “Are you Janet Moodie?” she asked.

  I put my papers aside and stood up. “I sure am.”

  “I’m Natasha Levin.”

  As we shook hands, I sized her up. She was short—about my height, give or take an inch—and as cylindrical as a fireplug. Her face was a pale circle, slightly tanned, with a few barely visible freckles; her eyes were like bright black buttons over a snub nose and a firm mouth. Her hair, cut over her ears, was a shiny tangle of black curls, and she wore splashy earrings of silvery mesh that bounced and glinted when she moved her head. Her long black skirt and loose white shirt only somewhat obscured her stocky build and gave her the air of a gypsy dressed for a business meeting.

  “Nice to meet you.” I resorted to the cliché greeting of southern California. “How was your drive?”

  “Not bad, for LA. Carey texted me she’ll be a few minutes late; she got stuck in traffic behind an accident.”

  “Ugh. Sorry about that.”

  An awkward silence ensued. I tried to think of something to say, but all I wanted to do was close my eyes and rest for the interview with Sunny. “I’m sorry I’m not very social,” I said. “I’ve been on the road since about five this morning.”

  “Where from?”

  “Couple hours north of San Francisco.”

  “Jesus! That is a long way. I’ll shut up and let you relax.”

  That made me feel guilty. “Is there anything I can tell you about Sunny’s case?” I asked.

  Natasha cocked her head and thought for a few seconds. “Not that I can think of. Carey gave me the appeal briefs and a flash drive full of other stuff to read. And she told me a little about what Sunny’s like and what she told you last week about her early life—a pretty superficial interview, judging from her notes.”

  Was that supposed to be a dig? I resisted the urge to respond; there was no point in getting into dominance struggles with an investigator right now. The fact that she was probably right didn’t make me feel any more congenial toward her. Fortunately, Carey walked through the door at that moment.

  “Hi,” she said. “Sorry I’m late. I see you’ve met.”

  “Yes.” I gave a noncommittal half smile.

  We walked to the counter together and went through the visiting protocol: the inventory of what we were taking in, the trip through the metal detector, sign-in, and issuing of visitor badges. The staffer assigned as our guide to the visiting room was not a uniformed guard this time, but a counselor. “Weather’s starting to heat up,” he said, as we walked in a cluster past the roses, whose warm scent rose to meet us, along with the smell of recently mowed lawn.

  “Yeah,” Carey said. “I don’t feel ready for summer yet.”

  “I hear you,” he answered. “It gets really hot here. I’m from Minnesota, and I’ve never gotten used to it.”

  He let us into the building with the visiting room; a guard inside escorted us into the big room, took our paperwork to the guard at the desk on the far side, and left.

  Natasha surveyed the room. “I haven’t been here before. It’s actually nicer than I thought it would be. Looks better than my high school.”

  “It’s probably a few decades newer,” Carey said. “They’re building more prisons than schools these days.”

  I headed to the vending machines, followed by Natasha, to survey the choices before Sunny arrived.

  “Woah, Chinese chicken salad,” Natasha exclaimed. “You don’t see that in men’s prisons. But they probably ought to rename it, don’t you think?”

  The possibility that Chinese chicken salad might be culturally insensitive had not occurred to me. As I began to ponder the differences between my age group and Natasha’s, Carey answered, “No more than Russian dressing.”

  “You’ve got a point,” Natasha said, and harmony between the generations was, I hoped, restored.

  After Sunny met Natasha and was settled in an attorney visiting room with Carey, Natasha helped me get food and drinks from the machines and carry them back. As we moved cans, plastic-covered dishes, and flimsy white flatware from the trays we were carrying to the conference table, Natasha took the chair next to Sunny. Nice move, I thought; it was a more companionable arrangement than having Sunny face three interviewers across the table. Then we settled down to food and small talk.

  “Where did you come here from?” Sunny asked Natasha.

  “LA.”

  “What part?”

  “I live in the Hollywood Hills. Near Griffith Park Boulevard; do you know LA?”

  “Not really. My mother lives in Silver Lake. For a while when I was a kid I think she lived in Santa Monica, near the pier. We used to drive around to a lot of places when I visited her, but I couldn’t tell you where most of them were.”

  “I like Silver Lake,” Natasha said. “Cool place. Nice shops and restaurants.”

  “Is it still?” Sunny asked, a little wistfully. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it.” She became lost in thought for a moment, then asked, “You have to drive over the Grapevine to get here, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ugh,” Sunny said, with a shake of her head. “I always hated the Grapevine. Greg used to say I was being stupid about it, there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. But it made me nervous going over the mountains—all the curves in the road and cars driving way too fast—and the trucks! It still gives me the shivers just to think of it.”

  Natasha nodded in agreement. “It’s not fun.” She opened a plastic clamshell with a wedge of cheesecake in it. Sunny eyed it with interest. “Is that good?” she asked. “I’ve never tried it.”

  “Don’t know yet,” Natasha said. “Would you like some?”

  “Just a bite. I really am trying to lose some weight, and the doctor says I’m pre-diabetic, so I should stay away from sweets.” She turned to me. “I’ve lost two pounds since you were here last. Not a lot, but it’s going in the right direction.”

  “Wish I could say the same,” I said.

  Natasha moved the clamshell across the table, and Sunny took a delicate forkful and chewed it slowly before swallowing. “Mmm,” she said. “That’s yummy.”

  “Would you like some more? I could split it with you.”

  Sunny smiled and shook her head. “Oh, no, that’s fine.”

  “Anyone else?” Natasha asked. “Going, going, gone.”

  Carey shook her head, and I said, “I’ve eaten two conchas this morning; no more sweets for me for a while.”

  At some point, almost imperceptibly, we slipped into asking Sunny about her life with Greg.

  “You and I have talked about your relationship with Greg before,” I said, “but we’ll need to go over it again, to fill everyone in.”

  “Let’s start where we broke off last time,” Carey suggested. “How did you meet Greg?”

  “I was working at Dr. Ostrander’s office, and Greg was a patient there. He’d done something to his back, and he was getting adjustments once a week. He’d stop at the front desk to make an appointment, and he’d say something nice— compliment my earrings or a top I was wearing, like that.
He was flirting a little, the way men do; I didn’t think it was anything more at the time. Then one time he asked me out to dinner. Later he told me he’d fallen in love with me at first sight.” She rolled her eyes. “When you’re young, you believe those things, I guess.”

  I think we all nodded.

  “And you went to dinner with him?”

  “I told him I didn’t think I could because I couldn’t afford a babysitter, and he said he’d pay for it. So after that I said yes.”

  “How did the dinner go?” Carey asked.

  “It was wonderful,” Sunny said, the “wonderful” becoming a sort of sigh. “He took me to this really fancy steakhouse downtown—Vincent’s. White tablecloths, waiters, wine with dinner, amazing food. It was such an experience, especially then. All my money was going to rent and bills and the babysitter; just eating at McDonald’s was a treat. I remember I was afraid to eat as much as I wanted to; I could have finished the steak and baked potato, but I didn’t want him to think I was a pig.” She laughed.

  “How did he treat you? Did he want sex that night?”

  “No, he was a perfect gentleman.”

  I saw Natasha blink; even to me, the phrase sounded old-fashioned, like something out of a movie from the 1950s.

  “One of the girls at the office said he was a real ladykiller,” Sunny went on, “so I was kind of prepared for him to try. But nothing happened. I don’t think we kissed until the second or third time we went out. We didn’t actually make love until the weekend he took me to his house on the coast. That’s when I began to think he was serious about me.”