Next of Kin

by L. F. Robertson

  Belatedly, as we drove back to Harrison, it occurred to me that I ought to feel some moral ambivalence that we were allowing a woman who might have conspired in the murder of her stepfather to go unpunished. But, I thought, Sunny had sacrificed her own life for Brittany’s. And Brittany had honored her mother’s gift as best she could and done what she could to atone, and now she had a husband and children of her own. One person had already spent fifteen years in prison for the crime. Three families had already been broken by it. I couldn’t see the point of letting the prosecution fix its mistake by doing the same thing, or worse, to yet another one.

  The district attorney, still worried about publicity, set the hearing on his motion to dismiss the charges for the Friday before President’s Day weekend. I drove back to Harrison to be there. Since I wasn’t Sunny’s attorney of record any more, I sat in the audience, between Natasha and Carol. Brittany wasn’t there. When I asked Carol if she would be, she said that Sunny told her not to come, because she felt it would be better if she weren’t seen in Harrison. “I think it’s silly, but she’s still worried. We’re going to drive over to see her later today,” she said.

  Sunny, dressed in an off-white sweater and gray slacks (“I bought those for her yesterday,” Carol whispered), was escorted by the bailiff to the counsel table, where she sat next to Carey. Soon afterward, the judge came out to the bench looking relaxed and even, in a subdued way, pleased. Not many hearings end as happily as this. When we sat again, Beatty, the prosecutor, stood and made the motion, simple in its language, that the charges against the defendant in People v. Cheryl Ferrante, Hartwell County case number A117061, be dismissed in the interest of justice. The judge granted the motion and declared the court adjourned.

  Sunny and Carey turned and walked out the little gate between the front of the courtroom and the audience section, Sunny seeming a little stunned, as if she had just walked into bright sunlight from a darkened room. She saw Carol and walked into her arms, hugging her, and started to cry. Then she hugged each of the rest of us in turn, as we all smiled and cried and said silly things about how amazing and wonderful it was.

  “You know,” Carol said to Sunny, “we should all go to the Pepper Tree Café for breakfast.”

  Sunny turned to her, wide-eyed. “Really? Is it still around?”

  “Yes,” Carol said, “and as good as ever. I went there yesterday for dinner, to make sure.”

  Sunny dabbed her eyes and blew her nose with a Kleenex given to her by Carol. “Chorizo and eggs,” she said. “That’s what I want.”

  The Pepper Tree was in the old downtown, and we walked there. The air was chilly, but Sunny didn’t seem to notice. She kept gazing around her and commenting on how green everything was, and what had and hadn’t changed since she’d been in jail. “Didn’t that antique store used to be a television repair place? And that wine shop was a stationery store. I remember it; I used to buy birthday cards there.”

  She was delighted that the Pepper Tree appeared unchanged. Its décor was intensely western, with antique branding irons, bridles, and bits decorating the walls between posters of cattle brands and paintings and photos of ranch life. Over huge breakfasts of eggs and meat, home-fried potatoes, and muffins, we asked Sunny if she had plans for what to do next.

  “Kind of,” she said. “First, Carol and I are going to drive over to Wofford Heights and spend the weekend with Brittany and Rick and the kids. Then we’re all going down to LA and—you’re gonna laugh at me, this is so hokey—we’re going to Disneyland.”

  We did laugh; it sounded like a perfect California wish come true.

  “We may drive out to Laguna Beach,” Sunny went on, “while we’re down there. I’d like to see the water again, even though it’s February. And then—then Carol and I fly to New Mexico.”

  “Sunny’s going to stay with Tom and me for a bit,” Carol said. “But I have a line on an apartment and a job that would suit her really well. We’ll take it a step at a time. Right now, I’m just glad to have her here.”

  As we walked back to our cars, I drew Carol aside. “Sunny’s moving to New Mexico?” I asked.

  Carol nodded. “I know it seems strange,” she said, “but she asked me if she could come live near us.”

  “Did she say why? Not that I don’t think it’s a great idea— hey, I’d like to live in New Mexico—but I’d have thought she’d want to stay close to her family.”

  “Maybe eventually.” Carol glanced at Sunny, walking and talking with Carey, then back at me, with a shake of her head. “I don’t know everything she’s feeling. I know she loves Brittany—consider what she did for her. I suspect she just needs some time to find forgiveness.”

  29

  Word of the dismissal of Sunny’s case traveled quickly on the grapevine, and Carey and I were minor celebrities at the death penalty conference that weekend. Exonerations—the ultimate victory—are rare, but they sustain us through long strings of losses, giving hope that justice sometimes does ride to the rescue when it’s needed. Old acquaintances and people I’d never met came up to congratulate me and ask how we’d done it. I didn’t know how to answer. I knew what had happened, but there was no simple why: a series of small steps, some strokes of luck, some clever strategizing, mostly by Carey. And I was as reluctant as Sunny herself to get into the questions raised about Brittany’s role in the murder. So I said thank you and mumbled self-deprecating clichés about good luck and the contributions of a great team.

  Not long afterward, I took another long weekend, bundled the dogs into the car, and drove up to Corbin’s Landing, at Ed’s invitation, to see how his work on the house had gone. The beauty of the last part of the drive, with steep green hills on one side and the ocean, crashing on rocky beaches, on the other, unknotted, as it always did, a lot of the cords of tension inside me. As I got close to Corbin’s Landing, and into the fire zone, I made a joke to the dogs about returning to Manderley.

  In this Mediterranean climate, winter, with its rains, is spring, the time of renewal, and new grass and weeds were sprouting, lush and green, among the burned trees and downed logs and the cleared areas around houses that had been saved and others that had not. The bulldozers had been at work along my road, and brush and logs had been gathered into piles, to be chipped and burned or scattered before the wet season ended. My lot was cleared, and so was Ed’s, a flat patch of ground all that remained where his house had been. He had made sure the bulldozers steered clear of the orchards, though, and my little trees still stood, skeletal frames, knee deep in lush green grass, pointing thin blackened fingers into the air. My house, no longer surrounded by woods, sat exposed on the hillside, dominating the landscape.

  The house, with new floors and new drywall, freshly painted, was cleaner and brighter inside than I remembered. I admired it and thanked Ed profusely. “What’s happening with your place?” I asked.

  “Nothing much,” he said. “Working with the insurance company and a builder, but everyone is so backlogged, they don’t know when they’ll be able to get to me. Figure I’ll be here for a while, if you don’t mind.” I didn’t. For all its familiarity, the house seemed no longer mine, as if we had both, figuratively speaking, moved on in the months since our separation. I had felt much the same way, I remembered, the first time I came back to my parents’ house in Anchorage after moving to California.

  The dogs greeted each other as old friends and romped beside us as we walked around the lot. I was glad to see that the Meyer lemon tree, in its pot on the deck, had a crop of bright yellow fruit. Next to the kitchen door, I noticed a small dish of kibble. Ed saw my glance and said, “By the way, that orange cat of yours seems to be coming around again.”

  “Dodger? Oh, my God!” Impulsively, I gave Ed a hug. “I felt so bad about leaving him behind. I can’t tell you how relieved I am.”

  “Well, he won’t come near me, but I’m leaving him some food outside like you did. It doesn’t hurt to have a good mouse hunter around.”

&
nbsp; “Yep,” I said, remembering the vole corpses that had kept appearing outside my kitchen door. “He’s your man for that.” I wished him and Ed a happy life together.

  In the orchard, I tried cutting some of the tree branches with a pair of borrowed pruners, hunting for live wood, finding their metal identification tags: Gravenstein, Golden Delicious, Belle de Boskoop, King David, Winter Pearmain. Some of the younger trees were dead at the grafts, but the older ones had living wood and buds on some branches. They’d been set back, but they’d probably survive and grow again. I felt a wave of nostalgia as we walked through the rank wet grass, smelling the green scent of it underfoot combined with the salt tang of the moist air.

  I treated Ed to dinner at Vlad’s and greeted a few old acquaintances there, who asked casually what I was up to and where I was living these days. Back at the house, Ed gave me his bed for the night and slept on the sofa in the living room. All the furniture he’d brought into the house was new, and a lot nicer than what he’d had in his old house. I wondered idly whether Laurie had helped him pick it out.

  As I left the next morning, I took one more long look back at the house, not saying goodbye, because I knew I’d be back there again, if only to get it ready to sell, but wondering whether my life here was a closed chapter.

  Back in Holly Beach, with no trees of my own to winter prune, I borrowed a ladder from Roger and pruned the neglected plum tree, which was growing a forest of shoots skyward from its top. Admiring my handiwork after an hour of heading and thinning cuts, I felt like a good tenant—not the best housekeeper, but at least a well-meaning steward.

  Early in the spring, Gavin and Rita visited, on their way from seeing one group of friends in Los Angeles to another in Berkeley. They were an attractive couple: Gavin, spare, dark-haired, and reserved, resembled Terry more than ever. Rita, also dark and slender, shone with a kind of inner light. They had great news. “We’re expecting,” Gavin said, and I noticed again the hint of an Australian accent creeping into his California one. “We found out just before coming here.” The baby was due in the fall; they didn’t yet know if it would be a girl or a boy.

  They asked about the fire, and I told them. “How are you doing?” Rita asked me, with genuine solicitousness. “Actually not at all badly,” I said. “It could have been a lot worse.”

  We spent an afternoon playing with the dogs on the local dog beach and walking the hills above the ocean—not as high or wild as those on the north coast, but still forbiddingly beautiful—and ate dinner at a seafood restaurant. They stayed the night with me, sleeping in my bed, while I, emulating Ed’s courtesy, took the living-room sofa, the two cats jockeying for space on my feet, and Charlie and Lizzie squeezed end to end in the narrow space between the sofa and the coffee table.

  The next morning I treated Gavin and Rita to breakfast in town at Lucia’s, a place recommended by Jackie, before they left to drive up through Big Sur to Monterey. “We probably won’t be able to visit for a while,” Rita said as we ate, “with the baby and all. Can you come see us? We have so many more places to show you; and my parents would love to get to know you better.”

  “You’ll have to nag her,” Gavin said to Rita, with a smile in my direction. “She’s a workaholic, and it’s really hard to get her to take a break.”

  Outside the house, their suitcases packed into the car, we exchanged hugs and well wishes. “Keep me up to date about the baby,” I said.

  “We will,” they said, and Gavin added, “Come visit when he’s born.”

  “He?” Rita said. “I keep thinking of her as a girl. But definitely come see us and the baby. We’ll expect you.”

  I promised. I watched them drive off, and felt again that sharp ache of seeing your children leave, like birds taking flight, to take their places in a separate part of the world.

  That evening, Jackie, Roger, and I drove together to the next town over, to hear a group (“they’re just the best—you have to come hear them,” Jackie had gushed) that played Scottish music.

  The concert was in a retired church that had been turned into a coffee house and book store, with a makeshift stage where the altar had been. The band, three very ordinary-looking middle-aged men with graying hair and slight paunches, played old jigs, reels, strathspeys, and airs, and occasionally sang a song in Gaelic or stopped to tell drily funny stories in a soft Scottish burr. The audience sat on mismatched folding chairs and spent the intermission nibbling cookies washed down by cheap wine. The music was a lot like that I’d heard as a kid at my grandfather’s house, on old records, or when he played the fiddle; my father also sometimes played it on CDs on weekend afternoons as he worked on some project around the house. It always had an edge of nostalgic melancholy, a minor note lurking under it; it was music of loss, lost love, lost wars, lost lands, the diaspora of people leaving a beloved country to live in exile.

  It was raining when we left, and I guess I was quieter than usual on the drive home. “Penny for your thoughts,” Jackie said from the front seat.

  I could see the back of her head silhouetted against the flashes of headlights and the highway disappearing ahead of me in the rain-streaked darkness. “Nothing much,” I said. “I guess I was thinking of home.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book is something of an appreciation and defense of my adopted home state of California, from the north coast redwoods to the agricultural Eden of the Central Valley, iconic landscapes and hidden corners, sprawling mega-cities and ambitious small towns, and the country around them, an amazing diversity of people and cultures – and the largest prison system and death row in the United States. I have quite a few people to thank for helping me try to bring the book to fruition, particularly Sam Matthews and Miranda Jewess, my encouraging and patient editors, my always supportive agent Kimberley Cameron, and Michael Kurland, my life partner, who batted ideas around with me, took the time to read and critique drafts and the finished manuscript, and talked me through my personal crises about the book and my career as a writer. And I owe thanks to the capital defense attorneys I’ve known over the years, for teaching me how to practice in this complex and esoteric branch of the law (to which I doubt any novel could really do justice) and holding up the example of their idealism and dedication to the cause of criminal defense.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  L.F. Robertson is a practicing defense attorney who for the last two decades has handled only death penalty appeals. Until recently she worked for the California Appellate Project, which oversees almost all the individual attorneys assigned to capital cases in California. She has written articles for the CACJ (California Attorneys for Criminal Justice) Forum, as well as op-ed pieces and feature articles for the San Francisco Chronicle and other papers. Linda is the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Unsolved Mysteries, and a contributor to the forensic handbooks How to Try a Murder and Irrefutable Evidence, and has had short stories published in the anthologies My Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years and Sherlock Holmes: The American Years. The first Janet Moodie book, Two Lost Boys, was her first novel.

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  TWO LOST BOYS

  L.F. ROBERTSON

  Janet Moodie has spent years as a death row appeals attorney. Overworked and recently widowed, she’s had her fill of hopeless cases, and is determined that this will be her last. Her client is Marion ‘Andy’ Hardy, convicted along with his brother Emory of the rape and murder of two women. But Emory received a life sentence while Andy got the death penalty, labeled the ringleader despite his low IQ and Emory’s dominant personality.

  Convinced that Andy’s previous lawyers missed mitigating evidence that would have kept him off death row, Janet investigates Andy’s past. She discovers a sordid and damaged upbringing, a series of errors on the part of his previous counsel, and most worrying of all, the possibility that there is far more to the murders than was first thought. Andy may be guilty, but does he deserve to die?

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is a must-read”

  KATE MORETTI, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

  “Suspense at its finest”

  GAYLE LYNDS, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

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