All About Evie

by Cathy Lamb

  I smiled at Jules through Skype. She was packing as we talked. “Look at our gifts for the wedding guests!”

  Oh. My. They were black cloth headbands with JULES AND MACK FOREVER in white along the front. You tied them in the back and the ends hung down through your hair. Very stylish and motorcycle-ish.

  “They’re cool and radical and perfect,” I said. “Everyone will love them.”

  “It’s a way to unite everyone, pull us all together on the day when Mack and I commit to our passion and come together forever and ever as one body.”

  “I can’t wait to put mine on. Finally, I will be cool, look cool. Your wedding is going to be a bash.”

  “Oh, Evie,” Jules choked out, her fingers laced together, tears coming forth. “You’re always so supportive of me. Everything I do. You’re so encouraging. You told me to start my motorcycle painting business, and now I have six people working for me. And you told me to give Mack a chance and I did, and now look. He’s my soul mate. My love mate. My bed mate. We don’t even fight. If we have a disagreement he says, ‘Let’s go to bed and think about it,’ and then we make love and we forget what the little argument was about. He goes to work and takes care of all those sick kids and they love him and I do my business and then he comes home and we have a quickie before dinner and then we talk and I tell him my problems and worries and he hugs me in bed and lets me lie on top of him until I feel better. And all because you said, ‘Give Mack a chance.’ You’ve always wanted me to be happy and yet you have to deal with fortunetelling and it’s made your life so hard, yet you want me to be happy . . .” She stopped, overcome. She blew her nose. She snuffled.

  “You’re making me cry again, Jules. Please don’t.” I wiped my tears.

  “Okay, okay! But I love you, love-sister!” Her voice pitched up, chin trembling. “Wait. Evie.” She wiped her tears away. “I know I’ve asked you this already, but have you had any premonitions about us?”

  “No, I haven’t.” And that was true. Premonitions work in odd ways. “But I feel your happiness. I feel his happiness. I feel your love together.”

  “Oh! Oh! Oh!” She put her head down, hands to face, overcome.

  “Don’t do it, Jules, don’t do it! You’re making me cry more!” My voice broke. Dang it! She makes me cry too much! We both burst into a fresh round of sloppy, noisy tears.

  “I can’t believe you’re getting married!” I sobbed.

  “Me either.” She put a hand to Skype, and I touched her fingertips to mine.

  It’s so exhausting being this emotional.

  * * *

  On a sunny morning, blue and sweet, Mr. Jamon told me he wanted a book “set in Africa. I’ve never been there, I obviously won’t go now, so I need to learn about it. I’ve only read about twenty books on Africa—I checked my book list on my computer—so my education is lacking on that continent. What do you have?”

  I gave him my two favorites.

  “And one more romance.”

  We went to the romance section. He chose another bodice ripper set in the 1800s. He winked at me. “Getting to know my feminine side in 1850.”

  I laughed.

  “We all need love, don’t we?”

  “We sure do, Mr. Jamon.”

  “I’m an old man who still believes in romance!”

  * * *

  It is hard to catch goats.

  Goats are quick and they are tricky. They don’t like to be caught, they don’t want to be caught, they want to be independent and free.

  I finally grabbed Mr. Bob and threw a rope around his neck. If he were human, he would be a rebel. Leather coat and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, his jaw unshaved.

  “Stop it, Mr. Bob, right now!” I told him. He bucked about and struggled. I had to grab him so I could check his left back hoof. He seemed to be limping. “Stop fighting. Dang it, Mr. Bob!” He pulled on the rope and it shouldn’t have caught me off balance, but it did. I tripped over my boots and landed in mud, the “leash” slipping right from my hand.

  He wriggled out of the loop around his neck and took off, bucking his back legs at me. When he was ten yards away, he glanced back at me as if to say, “Ha. Ha. I have outrun you again, peasant. Bring me more food.”

  Trixie trotted up and sniffed me. She is a gentle sort, but she has a temper. She ran over and bucked Mr. Bob in the head. Mr. Bob ran away, and she came back to check on me. We are bonded in woman power. I know she’s a feminist.

  Sundance growled, then ran after Mr. Bob, who skittered away and then jumped on the roof of his blue house. Sundance barked at him, my dear friend.

  I pulled myself up and out of the sludge and wiped myself off. I looked over at the sheep in the next section. They were gazing innocently back at me as in, “We had nothing to do with this. We are innocent.”

  Shakespeare and Jane Austen looked at me, chewing their hay. “That goat is annoying,” I could almost hear them saying. “Such a pest.”

  Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and Ghost watched from various areas, two sitting on the fence.

  I had a feeling they were all laughing at me in a kind and loving way, as if I had deliberately entertained them.

  “Fine, you rebellious and difficult goat!”

  Mr. Bob threw his hooves in the air on top of the roof to show me who was boss, and I ducked between the slats in the white fence and headed home, through rows of hydrangeas, columbines, and purple and yellow daisies. I needed a shower. I was now dirty and sweaty because of a naughty goat.

  Sundance ran up beside me and licked my hand. What a pal.

  Chapter 29

  Tilly Kandinsky

  Portland, Oregon

  1985

  When Tilly was seventeen years old, she was able to put all the drifting, terrorizing pieces of her life together like a puzzle, and she remembered the night her father was killed.

  She flinched as she remembered her father punching Johnny in the face, screaming at him . . . She saw Betsy bursting through the front door, her face not surprised at all, as if she knew what she would see . . . then Betsy turned toward the kitchen and ran back out with a butcher knife in her hands and stabbed her father after he hit Johnny again, Johnny’s head snapping back.

  Tilly remembered, too, what her brother and father were fighting about, and what Johnny accused her father of doing. Was Johnny right?

  Tilly’s mother left when she was five. That’s when they all of a sudden moved away to Oregon from Idaho. But as her mind cleared, Tilly began to wonder if her father was telling the truth about her mother leaving her. Her mother had loved her. She had told Tilly she loved her every day. She hugged her all the time, made her Mickey Mouse waffles on Sunday and her lunches for school every day. She tucked notes into her lunch sack. She took her for ice cream and to the movies, even if her mother had bruises on her face or she walked with a limp after what her father had done to her.

  Tilly’s father told her that her mother had left them when she got up one night to give her a hug because she’d had a nightmare. Her father was all dirty, mud dripping off of him, standing in the family room in his black gardening boots.

  “Your mother left us,” he said, panting, his face red and sweaty. “She doesn’t love us anymore.”

  “What? Yes, she does,” she protested, already tearing up. “She loves me.”

  “No, she doesn’t, Tilly. She had a boyfriend and she moved out, and we’re moving, too. Start packing.”

  “I don’t want to go without Mommy! I’m not leaving without Mommy!”

  Her father slapped her across the face, sending her sprawling into a wall, and told her, “Shut up and quit crying, you stupid baby.”

  Then Johnny came out of his bedroom. He was fifteen years old. Her father told him that they were moving, that their mother had left them. “No she didn’t,” he said. “She didn’t leave us, she wouldn’t do that.”

  Their father roared and grabbed Johnny by the throat and shoved him against the same wall and told him to shut
up, too, or he would “beat the hell out of him.” Tilly screamed. “Let him go! Let him go! Daddy! Stop, he can’t breathe!”

  They moved the next morning and left Idaho. Tilly remembered that her father told a neighbor, an elderly man they passed on the way out of town, that the “whole family is moving,” which was strange because he had told her that her mother had left them. Maybe he was embarrassed that his wife had left him, she thought, initially. . . .

  And now, with Kate, her patient therapist, Tilly finally allowed herself to think about her loving mother, how Gabriella never would have left them . . . and what the dirt on her father’s boots meant.

  Tilly had never read Johnny and Betsy’s trial transcripts, but she read them now. That was the last piece of the puzzle. The therapist said, “What are you going to do now?”

  Tilly told her.

  The therapist nodded at her. “I was hoping you would say that.”

  * * *

  Tilly was working hard in high school, dreaming of going to college, and she had a job at an ice-cream parlor.

  With money from that job, and three hundred dollars from her foster parents, she flew to her old home in Idaho. After she landed, she took a bus and then hitchhiked. Their old home, out in the country, off a dirt road, no neighbors around, stood tilting. Abandoned. A lazy raccoon and an alarmed possum darted out when she stepped into the entry.

  The house was dark, shabby, rickety. Yet the curtains with the embroidered Mexican flowers her mom had sewn were still there. She would wash them and use them herself. She picked up some of her mother’s other things that had not been stolen: two flowered aprons; one tablecloth with red tulips, and one with a Mexican village; several mugs and her favorite teapot painted with a Mexican family. She took a few of her mother’s colorful Mexican-style shirts and skirts that still hung in the closet like ghosts.

  Tilly, her hands shaking, found her mother’s faux pearl alarm clock under the bed, two red-framed photos of cats they had owned before her father had killed them, and her mother’s colorful silk scarves, one of which her father wound tightly around her mother’s neck one rainy night. She decided to leave that one at the house.

  She found a black garbage bag for her mother’s treasures, then grabbed two dolls she hadn’t had time to take when they left. She looked through a collection of children’s books her mother had bought her. Some were too moldy to keep, but she managed to salvage five.

  Tilly lifted a floorboard under her mother’s nightstand and pulled out a purple sock. Her mother’s money was still there: $800. She remembered her mother hiding money from her father, probably so she and Tilly and Johnny could one day escape.

  Tilly sat on her parents’ bed frame and cried like she hadn’t cried in years. After she pulled herself together, she brought the bag outside, took a deep breath, and went searching for what she didn’t want to find but knew she needed to find.

  She crawled under the house. It was moldy and smelled like a sewage. The house had tilted, so one part was open to more daylight than the other. She saw nothing there. She headed to their crumbling red barn. She climbed up to the hayloft and peeked around, then she explored their weathered outbuilding and saw nothing except tools and her father’s old lawnmower.

  Tilly knew that the house, barn, and outbuilding had been searched by the police after Johnny accused their father of killing their mother during his trial. When she read the trial transcripts, her brother had never mentioned a door in the ground. Why would he? He didn’t know about it. She had remembered the door only recently, when she’d started thinking more and more about how her mother disappeared. The door that skipped through her mind was ominous, dirty, so scary she blocked it out for years.

  But Tilly remembered one time, before her mother died, when she had followed her father. She held her pink teddy bear in one arm and a bag of popcorn in another. Her mother had made her the popcorn, her face bruised, her hand clutching her stomach, before she went to bed. It was the middle of the afternoon, but her mother said she was tired.

  Tilly was bored and Johnny was at school. Her father zoomed up their driveway in his black truck, then drove into the back part of their property, up the hill, down the hill, and behind a rim of trees near the stream. Her father had warned her never to go over there, ever, but she went anyhow. She would be a detective! She had read a book about a girl detective.

  Tilly ran and skipped and jumped, up the hill, down the hill, and hid behind the rim of trees near the stream until she could see her father. He seemed to disappear near the rim of trees, to the right of a large rock. She scampered closer and saw him with a long package in his arms, wrapped in black plastic. Then he disappeared below the ground!

  What happened? She heard a door shut, but there were no doors in the ground. She was deeply frightened all of a sudden. Her father had a temper. He hit her mother, he hit Johnny. He hit her sometimes, too. She didn’t know where he had gone, but now she wanted to get away. She felt something scary, something threatening, so she ran back to the house and never told Johnny or her mother what she had seen. If her father found out, he would beat her with a belt again, she just knew it.

  That afternoon, Tilly took a deep breath and headed out toward the back part of their property, up the hill, down the hill, and behind the rim of trees toward the stream. She didn’t know where to look at first. She knew now that her father may have had a hiding place back here. She was so young when she’d seen him with the black package, but what she saw wasn’t right. Was there a cellar all the way out here? Had he dug a hole? Then she saw it. The rock she’d remembered as a child. Her father had disappeared to the right of the rock. She got on her hands and knees and moved nettles and dirt for over an hour until her hands finally hit wood.

  She brushed the dirt and rotting debris away until she uncovered a door in the ground, with a handle and a padlock. She could not remove the padlock, but she could remove, by stomping on it, the rotting wood around it. At first, when the door finally gave way, she saw nothing but a moldy ladder. Below that, a black pit. There were ropes and chains on the walls. There was dirt on the floor.

  Tilly peered into the gloom. A rush of cool air that smelled of rot and mold and something else wrapped itself around her. She coughed, covered her face with her elbow, and sat back until the smell dissipated. Shaking, knowing she would see what she didn’t want to see, she gripped the ladder hooked to the side of the wall.

  She wanted to run. She wanted to call the police. She wanted to get out of there, the sense of evil cloying. But more than that, she wanted to know. She climbed down the ladder, a step at a time. When she reached the bottom, the stench unbelievable, as if the devil had rotted, she took a deep breath, told herself to be brave, once again, and looked around.

  Instantly, she wanted to scream.

  Tilly swallowed down the bile in her throat. Inside the carved-out dirt room, in the place where her father told her never, ever to go, were the bodies.

  She recognized one of her mother’s favorite dresses on a skeleton.

  There were other skeletons. They wore dresses, too.

  Tilly fought nausea and dizziness. She couldn’t breathe. She scrambled back up the ladder, collapsed on the ground, and wretched.

  Momma, she cried, her head tilted toward the sky when she let out a tortured cry. Oh, Momma.

  * * *

  The police came to Tilly and Johnny’s former home in the country. She could hardly speak. It was as if she had regressed to when she was a child after her father was killed. She met the police at the end of the dirt road. They drove her back up to her home, then to the back part of their property, up the hill, down the hill, and behind a rim of trees toward the stream. She showed them the door in the ground, to the right of the rock, the door into hell, her whole body trembling, swaying. The police helped her, gently told her everything would be okay. But they hadn’t seen what she had seen. How could they know? Nothing would be okay.

  She pointed to the ladder. One of th
e policemen climbed down. She heard him gagging. Then he swore and yelled back up, “We got a crime scene.”

  * * *

  The press had a field day after the discovery of five women’s bodies in a secret dirt cave underground near Johnny and Tilly Kandinsky’s childhood home in Idaho.

  Evidence was collected at the Idaho house and at the home in which they’d previously lived in Portland. Two more women were buried underneath the crawl space of that home. It did not take long to pin the murders of the women on Peter Kandinsky.

  “Will my brother, Johnny, and his girlfriend, Betsy, be released from jail?” Tilly asked in front of news reporters and cameramen, her voice wobbling, her body shaking. “You see, this is who my father was. He was a serial killer. Betsy killed him to protect Johnny. If she hadn’t killed my father, my father would have killed Johnny, maybe Betsy, and more women after that if he wasn’t caught. Betsy ended up protecting all of the women whom my father would have killed in the future.”

  And, finally, “I remember that night. I’ll tell you what happened.” And she told herself to be brave one more time, to fight for Johnny and Betsy, and she told the press what happened, including that she saw her father turning toward the gun cabinet. “He was going to shoot Johnny. I know that for sure.”

  The prosecutor’s office fought against a new trial for Johnny and Betsy. They didn’t want to be seen as having been derelict in their duties, incompetent! They didn’t want to admit they had been wrong, that the barely eighteen-year-old Betsy and Johnny had not deserved time in jail. Their reputations had to be protected! Their egos had to remain uncriticized! One of them was running for governor, and he could not have a bad high-profile case like this on his hands.

  Tilly was seven years old back then. She was a silly girl. She couldn’t remember anything correctly, could she? Why open up the case again because of an emotional, unstable teenager’s new testimony? Johnny and Betsy had killed the father in cold blood, and that was that. And for God’s sakes, the murdered women in the dirt cave could not be brought up in a new trial. That was irrelevant, unnecessary, it lent no new evidence to the case!