Next of Kin

by L. F. Robertson

  The route crossed the middle of the state on a series of two-lane highways. The area was enormous and empty, mile after mile of hills and valleys covered in dried summer grass, not yet greened up by winter storms—range land without enough water for farms or towns. It often amazed me that a state as populated as California could contain so much empty space.

  Because Natasha had driven from Los Angeles to meet me, we were each in our own cars, so I was left to my thoughts as I contemplated the almost meditative landscape of hills and valleys and hills beyond to the pale sky. I was surprised by how few I had and how prosaic they were. Whether the tanker truck four cars ahead of me would ever turn off so we could move faster. What Natasha and I would say to Brittany when we saw her. Whether the families of the dogs I was caring for (and who were currently living, along with Charlie, at Ed’s) would ever be able to have them back. How it would feel to have to give your dog away because your house had burned down. The fact that anything you have can be taken from you in an instant—by a fire, a crash of glass and metal, a doctor’s words, a phone call. When my thoughts turned again to the country I was crossing, I noticed that the color and shape of the little clouds in the sky around and above me, the color of the sky itself, were those of autumn, carrying imaginary scents of apples and fallen leaves and the real promise of rain.

  Eventually I reached one of the arterial freeways that connect the north and south of the state, like concrete rivers down the Central Valley, and drove for an hour or so past a succession of industrial parks and weed-filled lots. After turning off and driving some more, through suburbs of new subdivisions and then more range land, I suddenly entered a long desert canyon, miles of winding two-lane road next to high sandstone cliffs and a rapidly flowing river. When I emerged, just as suddenly, onto a larger highway, it was in a long, wide valley dotted with ranches and stands of mountain pine trees. At its end lay a large lake, a reservoir with a dam at its near end. Wofford Heights was across the highway from the lake, a hillside full of houses facing the view across the valley. I pulled off the highway into the dirt parking lot of a white-painted Quonset hut with a carved wood sign over the door reading “Antiques” and another of cardboard on the door saying “Closed for the Season.” The place was utterly deserted; the fitful rush of wind from the valley seemed only to intensify the silence.

  I phoned Natasha. She had pulled off a little down the road, and I drove to meet her.

  “Dang, this place is remote!” I said, as we stood next to our cars.

  “Actually, it used to be kind of famous,” she told me. “Hollywood studios made a lot of westerns around here. It’s still a pretty popular place for people to have a little vacation home up in the mountains. When I was in college I had some friends in LA who used to come up here on river rafting trips. I went with them a couple of times.”

  I had never been on a rafting trip, even in Alaska. “How did you like it?”

  “It was fun, not too scary; I’d do it again.”

  In phone calls and again over lunch after our abortive visit with Braden, we’d compared notes about what we wanted to ask Brittany. I felt as prepared as I ever would be for this meeting. I took a deep breath and said, “Well, are we ready to go?”

  “Yep,” Natasha said.

  We drove up in my car, leaving Natasha’s parked off the road. The sun had dropped below the mountains, and we climbed the narrow roads that wound up the hill in gray twilight, searching for signs for the streets my GPS was telling us to follow. Most of the houses along them were manufactured homes; Brittany’s was a white double-wide in a small yard prettily landscaped with desert plants. A fall-themed garland with yellow and orange oak leaves and red berries hung on the front door, and three pumpkins were arranged at one side of the small front stoop. The evening was growing chilly, and a faint scent of wood smoke from stoves and fireplaces gave the air around us the cozy feeling of a winter night. I felt a twinge of longing for my own home and stove.

  As we reached the door, I could smell food cooking and hear children playing inside, and then a single bark from a large-sounding dog. We rang the bell, and a few seconds later the door was answered by a tall, muscular man in a dark shirt with a Cal Fire logo. His face was ruddy, broad, and boyish, and his reddish-blond hair, cut short, bristled on his head and at his temples. He looked surprised, but friendly. Next to him and a little behind, a Belgian Malinois dog—the breed used by the police and military—eyed us watchfully. Behind him, in the living room, I glimpsed a small boy and girl watching us with silent curiosity.

  “Hi,” the man said. “Can I help you?”

  “Is Brittany Ecker here?”

  “She is. Can I tell her who’s calling?”

  “I’m Janet Moodie, and this is Natasha Levin. We’re from her mother’s legal team.”

  “Oh!” he said. “Come on in and have a seat. I’ll get Britt for you. I’m Rick, her husband, by the way.”

  He led us to the sofa, a Scandinavian-type with marine blue upholstery and light wood arms, and went on toward the back of the house. The younger of the children, a little blond-haired girl, was standing and watching us shyly; as we sat she moved closer to the older child, a boy, who was sitting in an armchair watching something on an iPad and glancing up at us every few seconds. Natasha smiled at her, and she smiled back shyly.

  A minute later, Brittany, dressed in jeans and a violet Shaker-knit sweater with a print chef’s apron over them, came out from the back of the house, followed by Rick. Brittany was bigger and heavier-boned than Sunny. Her broad, pale face was pleasant, but not especially pretty; a few old acne scars pitted the skin on her forehead and chin. Her straight, reddish-brown hair was swept back and casually pinned up with a big barrette.

  “Hi!” she said cheerfully, as we stood up to greet her. “Mom said you’d be coming to see me at some point, but she didn’t know when.” She looked from one of us to the other. “What were your names again?”

  We told her, and she nodded. “I wish I’d known you were coming,” she said. “I don’t have any time to talk right now. I have a planning meeting at my church—we’re organizing relief for Puerto Rico—and I can’t skip it because I’m the chair. I’m just running around right now trying to get the kids fed before I go.” Her voice was high and youthful, with a bit of Harrison drawl in it; she sounded younger than Natasha, even though they were close to the same age. “I hate to ask you, but could we talk tomorrow morning? Will you be here overnight?”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding. Natasha might be able to make it back to LA tonight, but I’d have to wait till morning to start for home anyway.

  “Oh, good. When would you like to come over tomorrow?”

  “Whatever works for you.”

  “Nine would be good.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess we’d better go and let you get everything done.”

  She gave us a grateful smile, and we turned and let ourselves out.

  “I hope you don’t mind spending the night here,” I said to Natasha as we drove back to her car.

  “Nah. I was thinking we should even if we did the interview tonight. I wouldn’t want to drive back down that canyon in the dark.”

  “Any idea where we might stay?” I asked her.

  “There’s a cute town up the road a bit. It’s where the kayak and raft tours used to take off. There are some motels up there. We used to camp, though, so I don’t know much about them.”

  We registered at the first motel we found in the town, a rustic-themed place with a lobby decorated like a small hunting lodge—wood-paneled walls, prints of forest and hunting scenes, and a big fireplace with a tame, but warm, gas fire. A vague attempt had been made to replicate the rustic theme in my room, but the result was a melancholy shoe box, with tan walls, dark wood furniture, a spruce green bedspread, and one window at the end, shut off from the outside with red, brown, and green plaid curtains. After dinner with Natasha at a diner nearby, I scrolled through the stations on the TV, turned it off,
and read myself to sleep over an Ellis Peters mystery I’d packed in the bottom of my overnight bag in case of emergencies, of which this was surely one.

  In the morning, frost covered the ground and the windows of our cars, and the air seemed to glitter in the slanting sun. After breakfast at the same diner we made our way back to Wofford Heights and Brittany’s house. She seemed more at ease when she greeted us. “Come and sit down,” she said. “Would you like some coffee? I just made a fresh pot.”

  “No thanks, we just ate breakfast,” we said, almost in unison.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I finish mine,” she said. She picked up a cup from the coffee table and carried it to an end table next to an armchair, while we took places on the sofa and opened our notebooks. In the morning sunshine her living room was bright and homey, with creamy white walls, maple laminate floors, and accents of bright colors in the print of the curtains and the cushions on the couch and chairs. The kids’ toys had been put away. In the corner stood an old-fashioned wood stove, with a protective screen around it and a dog rug in front of it; a fire was glowing in its window, warming the room. The walls displayed an assortment of family photos and a trio of framed cross-stitch panels of bouquets of flowers. “My mom made those,” Brittany said, noticing that they caught my eye. The air smelled faintly of last night’s dinner, woodsmoke, coffee, and dog. The dog, after sizing us up, had settled for a nap in front of the stove, with one eye partly open.

  Brittany leaned toward us, confidingly. “I’m glad you could come this morning,” she said, her voice lowered. “I feel a lot more comfortable talking without Rick here.”

  I nodded sympathetically, though I wasn’t sure why she felt that way.

  “The kids are in preschool until noon,” she went on, “so I’m free till then.” She sat up, reached for her coffee cup, took a drink, and put the cup down. I found myself wishing I’d asked for something to drink after all, if only to have something to do during the silence. “What do you think my mom’s chances are?” she asked, looking from one of us to the other.

  “I honestly don’t know,” I said. “Her appeal is still going on, and we’re going to file a habeas corpus petition for her. It all depends on what a court decides.”

  “Will they let her go?”

  “If we have strong enough evidence, they may send the case back for another trial.”

  “Oh.” Brittany sounded a little deflated. “Mom won’t talk to me about how she thinks things are going,” she said, a faint note of frustration in her voice. “She always says everything is fine and tells funny stories, and says not to worry. I know she’s trying to protect me, but—” She stopped and shook her head, and said, in a voice that for a few seconds seemed suddenly childlike and unguarded, “I just can’t believe this all happened, and she’s there.” I got the impression that Brittany was hungry for someone she could talk to freely about Sunny’s plight and her own feelings. “It’s like a constant weight—I feel so helpless.” She sighed, opened her hands, then clasped them together. “If there’s anything I can say or do, please tell me.”

  I glanced over at Natasha, who picked up the cue. “Maybe we can start with how things were with your family—you and your mother and Greg Ferrante. Like from the beginning.”

  Brittany nodded. “Okay. Wow, from the beginning. I was only around two when Mom and Greg got married, so basically all I remember as my family is the three of us. Mom always loved me, and so did Nana—my great-grandmother. And Linda and Pete were cool—Linda is my grandmother, Mom’s mother—she never wanted to be called Grandma,” she said with a smile and a little eye-roll. “But Greg always seemed kind of distant, kind of abrupt. I never called him Daddy or Dad, always Greg.”

  “What about his family?”

  “We used to visit the ranch quite a bit—Thanksgiving, Christmas, barbecues in the summer. They were nice to us, most of them.”

  “Did you make friends with any of your step-cousins?”

  “Not when I was a kid. They were all older or younger; there wasn’t anyone my age.”

  “What about your biological father?”

  “He wasn’t really in the picture. He got married again and had a couple of kids. He’d send, like, Christmas cards and some money on my birthday, but that was about it. Once he and his wife invited me to visit them for a week, but I don’t think his wife liked me, or something, and they didn’t ask again. Greg would bitch about him to my mom because he thought he wasn’t paying enough child support.”

  “How did Greg behave to you? Did he yell at you, or was he abusive to you or your mom?”

  “Not physically. He’d get mad, but it was all words.”

  “So was he abusive in other ways?”

  “Kind of,” she said slowly, as if uncertain. “He was mean—always putting us down, criticizing something. It seemed as if Mom and I could never do anything quite right. Like what we did was never up to his standards.”

  “What kinds of things was he critical of?”

  She sighed. “Oh, Lord, everything. He’d say stuff about the clothes Mom bought for her and me, or my hair, or how I behaved around company or his family. When I was younger, he blamed Mom for everything he didn’t like about me. But when I got older, he started ragging on me about all sorts of things: my weight, my grades, my music and clothes and friends. He never said anything kind or helpful. That’s really wrong to do to a teenage kid. I had little enough confidence as it was, and he just crushed me. Mom used to say not to let it bother me, that I was pretty and smart. But you can’t help it; it gets under your skin. When I was old enough to see how much he hurt her, too, I really started to hate him.” Brittany said the last part in a rush of words, and then stopped. “I didn’t know what to think of it then,” she went on, more thoughtfully, “but now I know what he was doing was, like, he was always gaslighting us—Mom even more than me.”

  “Did Greg and your mom argue?”

  “Not that much in the beginning. More toward the end. But Mom wasn’t any match for him. He was really overbearing, and at some point, she’d just stop talking. She’d just shut down.”

  “Were you aware that he was unfaithful to your mother?”

  “When I got old enough. Mom didn’t talk to me about it. But I overheard things they said sometimes. And I knew Mom was hurt. She always tried to be cheerful around me, but it was like—I don’t know—the atmosphere at home was always tense. Greg was pissed off all the time, Mom was trying to avoid him. I couldn’t stand to be there. I’d call Todd, and he’d come get me in his truck, and we’d go out to the ranch or to his sister’s place. Just get away.”

  “Did you know about the rumors that Greg was planning to leave your mom?”

  She hesitated. “I—I don’t think I heard about that until after—after he was killed.” I remembered that Sunny had told me the opposite, but decided not to confront her at that point. “I did see that Greg wasn’t around as much, and Mom was even more depressed than usual just before he died. I figured he was having another affair.”

  “More depressed? Does that mean she’d been depressed for a while?”

  “Yeah. She just… ran out of steam or something. She did the stuff she usually did—took care of the house, visited, played tennis—but she got more and more quiet. I was so used to Mom being perky and upbeat—that’s why they call her Sunny, I guess—that I really saw the change. I heard her tell Nana that she was trying an antidepressant and was taking something so she could sleep.”

  “Did she confide in Nana about her troubles?”

  “She tried not to. But Nana saw she was hurting. Nana could tell I was unhappy, too. Nana told Mom she ought to leave Greg, but Mom said she didn’t know what she’d do; she said the support he was supposed to pay her under the prenuptial agreement would only go so far, and she didn’t think she could find a job because her skills were all out of date. She said that if she stayed with Greg he’d give me a better life than she could on her own, pay for me to go to college. That
is one thing I have to say about Greg, he was never stingy with money. It was all about appearances, but he always gave Mom plenty of money for clothes and the house and stuff. He wanted us all to look good because that made him look good.”

  “Right,” I said. “The prosecution said that her motive for killing him was to get his money.”

  Brittany shook her head. “She didn’t want his money. I don’t even think she really wanted to leave him. She didn’t hate him. It’s like he’d convinced her that all the things he did were her fault, because she wasn’t the wife he wanted her to be. All she wanted was for things to be okay.” Her eyes met mine. “She didn’t kill him. Or pay for him to be killed. She’d never do that.”

  Natasha and I both nodded. “I know,” I said. “We’ll definitely get to that.”

  Brittany nodded and waited for the next question.

  “What happened right after Greg was killed?” Natasha went on. “Starting when you got home from visiting Nana?”

  She shivered. “Ugh. Let me think. We got home, went upstairs to put away some stuff—clothes we’d bought. Mom went back down, and then I did. She was in the kitchen, and I went out back over by the pool, and that’s where I found Greg.” She paused for a second, biting her lip. “Man, this is so hard, even after all this time.”

  “I’m sorry,” Natasha said. “It has to be tough to remember all that.”

  Brittany nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Do you remember why you went out to the pool?” Natasha asked. “Was it to swim?”

  “I don’t remember anymore; I just did. And saw him lying there; and I screamed and ran back into the house and called for Mom.”

  “Did you see the blood?”

  I saw her tense, and she nodded. “Yes. Kind of pooled behind his head. And his face…” She closed her eyes for a couple of seconds as if to push the memory away. “You’d think I’d be inured to all that now. But it’s different when it’s someone you know.”

  “Anything else catch your eye?”