by Steven Gore
Donnally nodded. “Her brother.”
“Where is he?”
“Dead.” He anticipated her next question. “And her parents were already dead when he dropped her off at New Sky.”
“Why, after all these years…” Her voice trailed off into a sigh.
“He wanted to leave her something,” Donnally said, knowing that the implication was different than the fact. Mauricio intended to leave her not just money, but a lifetime of confusion.
“He didn’t know she’d been murdered?”
“Not a clue.”
Trudy stared at the fire. It crackled against the rumbling of Sonny’s water, near boiling in the kitchen.
“Why didn’t he look for her sooner?”
“There’d be too much to explain and he was on the run.”
“What did he do?”
Donnally shrugged. “That’s not important. He figured there were good people at New Sky who’d take care of her and not call the police.”
The teapot whistled, then fell silent when Sonny slid it to a cool part of the stove.
“It’s sad that he never knew what a wonderful person Anna grew up to be,” Trudy said.
“He saw her once outside of Berkeley High School. I think he knew you did a good job raising her.”
Trudy inspected Donnally’s face. He felt she was setting him up to confirm what she was about to say.
“I guess it’s finally over,” she said. “Now with Rover convicted.”
Donnally cringed. She sounded like a delusional relative of a murder victim, the sort who give press conferences talking about the closure they’d get if the killer was executed, as if the memories would die just because a murderer’s breath ceased.
But he didn’t say what he was thinking. He hadn’t come up there to attack Trudy’s self-deceptions.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Donnally let the thought linger for a moment, then said, “I’m not sure Brown did it.”
Trudy’s body pulled back. Her hand flew to her open mouth, but her eyes remained dull and fixed and emotionless. Donnally thought she looked like a second-rate actress playing herself in a third-rate production of her life. He didn’t want her to see his disgust, so he looked away. He felt like walking into the kitchen and shaking Sonny, make him wake up to the fraud she was and stop putting himself at risk protecting her.
She found her voice. “The police said-”
“They were wrong.”
Donnally pushed himself to his feet and stepped to the fireplace. He wasn’t sure what to say next. He was relying on a delusional man to guide him to the truth, and he didn’t yet know what she was hiding.
“Then who did it?” she asked.
He turned back toward her.
“Who is R2D2?”
Metal crashed against metal in the kitchen as Sonny slammed the teapot down on the stove.
“You son of a bitch,” Sonny yelled as he charged into the living room. “I didn’t bring you up here to talk about Tsukamata.”
Sonny stopped next to Trudy’s chair and jabbed a finger down at her. “Don’t answer him.”
Trudy looked up at Sonny. “The police already know who they are. What difference does it make if he does?”
“They?” Donnally said.
“It’s not R2D2,” Trudy said, “but R2T2. Two brothers who lived at New Sky in 1975. Artie and Robert Trueblood.”
“They’re who the police think killed Tsukamata?” Donnally asked.
They both nodded.
“And the police want to get to them through you?”
“That’s what they’ve been trying to do since 1975,” Trudy said, then closed her eyes. Her shoulders slumped as if the effort of disclosing the pivotal truth in her life had depleted her.
Sonny stepped forward like a referee and held out his arms as if separating them.
“That’s enough,” Sonny said. “We’re getting into accessory-to-murder territory.”
Sonny looked back and forth between them until Donnally shrugged his consent.
“This has all been too much of a burden on her,” Sonny said to Donnally as he reached out and rested his hand on her shoulder. “She’s been sick for decades.” He glanced toward the doorway. “Bear and the others look after her.”
Donnally sat back down on the couch.
“Sometimes my muscles and bones ache so much I can’t move. If I do housework, even for an hour, it takes a week in bed before I can do anything else.”
Trudy reached up and laid her hand on top of Sonny’s.
“It’s like I have arthritis all over my body and I can’t move without excruciating pain.”
“Maybe we should finish talking in the morning,” Sonny said, looking first at Trudy, then at Donnally. “About everything but R2T2. They’re off-limits.”
Sonny escorted Trudy down the hallway to her bedroom and returned with some blankets for Donnally.
“There’s one thing you need to understand about Trudy,” Sonny told him. “She carries the weight of the world on her shoulders, that’s what makes her sick. It’s like she has the consciences of ten people. It paralyzes her.”
Donnally accepted the blankets from Sonny’s hands, then said, “I think it’s just the opposite. It frees her to do and believe pretty much anything she finds convenient.”
“How do you figure?”
“One person’s conscience prevents him from lying, stealing, or torturing, another’s insists that he do them all, as long as he can justify the goal.”
Sonny stared at Donnally for a moment, then said, “Jeez. That’s kind of a mind spinner. I never looked at it that way before.”
Chapter 33
I n the dawn light, Donnally surveyed the living room from where he lay on the couch.
Crocheted pillows lay on all the chairs. Embroidered cloth on the tables. Quilts with American Indian motifs hung on the walls along with paintings in a dozen styles. One of them was of the New Sky Commune. Carvings of bears, wolves, and salmon stood on shelves and in bookcases.
Donnally slipped outside. The forest was silent except for the croaking of two ravens on the peak of the A-frame roof. The second floor windows were shuttered. He realized that he’d heard no sounds emanating from upstairs since he arrived: no footsteps, no voices, no flushing toilet. Holding his breath, he listened for road traffic or jet noise or even the buzz of high-voltage wires. Nothing.
He looked up at the blue sky, and then at an outbuilding to the northwest and at a barn to the north, imagining how the house and the two structures would look from a low-flying plane. The three buildings formed a triangle, twenty yards across the clearing from point to point. He surveyed the rest of the property. A long dirt driveway entered from the west and dead-ended at the house. A ten-year-old Ford pickup was parked next to the front steps. He memorized the license plate.
Trudy wasn’t as far off the grid as Donnally had first imagined, for an electric power line emerged from the forest and connected to the southeast corner of the house, just below a satellite dish.
Donnally looked around for Bear, then walked past Sonny’s Willys to the barn. A heavy lock barred the door, but through the slats he could make out the contours of a thirty-year-old water truck with a twelve-foot-long tank and a gasoline-powered generator.
B y the time Trudy and Sonny emerged from the hallway next to the kitchen, Donnally had the table set and pancakes cooked.
“Smells wonderful,” Trudy said, as she sat down. She was dressed in Levi’s and an oversized Pendleton wool shirt, not looking as pale as the night before.
“Secret ingredient,” Donnally answered.
“Can’t be secret.” She smiled. “I know everything that’s in the kitchen.”
Sonny sniffed the air. “Nutmeg. Got to be.”
Donnally shifted the pancakes onto plates and carried them to a dining table that separated the kitchen from the living room. He watched them spread homemade blackberry jam and begin eating. Both were nod
ding within seconds.
“You’ve got lots of beautiful things here,” Donnally said, glancing around the living room, then sitting down.
Trudy smiled with pride. “I made most of them myself. I sell them at the flea market in Fort Bragg.”
“Not herself,” Sonny said. “Bear and some of the others run the booth.”
The comment returned them to the previous night’s conversation. Trudy’s smile faded.
Donnally wanted to ease back to where he’d left off, but recognized that anywhere he began might provoke another one of Sonny’s outbursts. He stirred sugar into his coffee before he said, “Did Anna know a psychiatrist named William Sherwyn?”
Trudy set down her fork. “Why do you ask that?”
“Something Rover told me.”
“What did he say?”
“That Anna called Sherwyn a rabbit.”
“Not a rabbit,” Sonny said. “Just Rabbit. That was his nickname at New Sky.”
Donnally felt a jolt. “Sherwyn was at New Sky?”
“Only for a few months in the late seventies,” Sonny said. “The son of a bitch.” He looked over at Trudy. “You want to tell him or should I?”
She lowered her eyes.
“The problem with being outside the system,” Sonny said, “is that as a matter of principle you can’t use it even when you really need to.”
“Which means?”
“We caught him molesting one of the kids. But instead of hauling him down to the police station, we kicked him out.”
Donnally dropped his hands to the table with a thunk.
“You did what?”
“Don’t give me grief, Donnally. The principle that allowed us to help Anna’s brother by taking her in is the same one that kept us from going to the police.”
“Letting a child molester walk away was a matter of principle?”
Sonny smirked. “Don’t say it like that. You’re the guy who took a dollar to create attorney-client privilege. Is that principle any different? Even if I told you I murdered somebody, you couldn’t turn me in.”
Donnally now had another reason to wish he hadn’t taken the money, but he wasn’t going to argue about consistency. The answers he wanted from Trudy weren’t philosophical.
“If Anna said to Sherwyn, ‘I know who you are,’ ” Donnally asked Trudy, “is that what she meant?”
“Did Rover tell you that?”
“He said you heard her say it, too.”
In her hesitation and her twitching eyelids, Donnally got his answer. She was there, in the house with Anna and Sherwyn and Brown. He pushed on before she could lie.
“I’m thinking that Anna wanted to expose Sherwyn, but he threatened that if she did, he’d snitch you off about R2T2 and Tsukamata.”
Trudy bit her lower lip, then nodded.
“It was a stalemate,” Donnally continued. “Neither of them could do anything.”
Sonny cut in. “And Anna wasn’t about to embarrass the ex-New Sky people. A lot of them had moved away and gone straight. College professors, lawyers, shop owners. They all had a secret that made them feel dirty and would’ve made them look dirtier.”
“Which? About the molestation or the murder?”
Donnally couldn’t suppress the sarcasm in his voice.
“The molestation. The murder had nothing to do with New Sky. R2T2 were just hiding out there. They were Black Guerilla Family members on the run from an armored car robbery in New Jersey.”
“We had no idea who they were at the beginning,” Trudy said. “We took them in like we took everybody else in. No questions asked.”
“Was Anna the child Sherwyn molested?”
“No. It was a boy.”
Donnally closed his eyes, trying to imagine Anna and Sherwyn arguing in the living room, and Rover and Trudy listening in the kitchen. The image led him to a question: What brought Sherwyn to the house in the first place? He directed it at Trudy.
“Did she tell you why Sherwyn had showed up after all those years?”
Trudy shrugged. “Anna said she wanted to look into some things first, but promised to tell me about it. She used the phrase, ‘do some research.’ ”
“She was murdered a week later, before she had a chance,” Sonny said, reaching over and taking Trudy’s hand.
“Did you find anything about Sherwyn in the house afterwards?” Donnally asked.
Sonny shook his head. “We looked through all of her papers, her diary, everything. Nothing with his name on it.”
Donnally looked at Trudy. “You still have all that stuff?”
Trudy looked at Sonny, then back at Donnally. The same hesitation. Then the same twitch.
“No.”
Chapter 34
“T rudy fell in love with Artie and bought the guns they used to kill Tsukamata,” Sonny said, as he drove them from the property that night.
“Why’d they kill him?”
“He suspected that Artie and Robert weren’t who they claimed to be and they were afraid he’d eventually figure it out. Artie got Tsukamata to pull him over for speeding and Robert was already set up on a rooftop with a rifle. The police came knocking on Trudy’s door a week after the murder. They just couldn’t prove she knew what the guns were for when she bought them, otherwise they would’ve charged her as an accessory.”
Donnally was lying in the back of the wagon, his head once again covered with the ski mask. But this time, instead of holding his gun, he held his cell phone, pressing “send” to call his home number, then disconnecting after his voice mail picked up in order to create a cell site trail back to the area of Trudy’s house.
“So she fled up here so she couldn’t be used as a witness against them?” Donnally asked.
“That’s what she thinks. But it’s no more real than her symptoms.”
“You mean they’re all psychosomatic?”
“Of course. You saw all the craft stuff she’s made. She’s like everybody else in the world. People do what they want to do. While most people rationalize when they don’t want to face something, Trudy paralyzes herself physically.”
“Why don’t you all confront her instead of coddling her?”
“It’s not my problem, it’s Bear’s. But he ain’t gonna do it either. She pretends he’s suffering from post-traumatic stress from the Vietnam War and he pretends she really is sick. It’s a perfect marriage of neuroses.”
“Where was he last night?”
“On guard duty.”
“Against who?”
“Everybody.” Sonny chuckled. “Real and imaginary.”
They rode in silence for a few minutes, then Donnally asked, “What’s upstairs?”
“Which upstairs? Anna’s?”
Donnally laughed. “You know I’m not asking about Anna’s.”
“Let’s just call it their workshop.”
Donnally rolled from his side to his back on the hard wagon bed and waited for Sonny to explain what he meant.
“You want to drag this out or just tell me?” Donnally finally said.
“You’ll never find the place again, so why not? They make most of their money sorting and cleaning marijuana for the growers up here.”
“I figured it was something like that, but I assumed they were the growers. I saw the tanker and generator.”
“Not for twenty years or so. Now they rent the equipment out to others. I think they’re nuts to keep doing what they’re doing. A lot of people would kill to find out where this place is so they could bust in when they’re sorting and steal the crop. It would be the quickest hundred grand anybody ever made.”
“Would kill or did kill?”
“You’re quick,” Sonny said. “That was one of the theories in the days after Anna was murdered. Some people thought that R2T2 did it. Trudy had made a run up to supervise a harvest. People were thinking that R2T2 were trying to get Anna to give up where the grow was so they could rip it off. Life on the run costs a lot of money, and it wasn’t like they
could hold day jobs. But Rover getting busted put that theory to rest.”
“Did Anna even know what was going on up here?”
“Sure. She didn’t like her mother doing it, but couldn’t stop her. Anna grasped what Trudy had refused to. Peace and love were dead and marijuana had become a business no different than heroin and speed. By the early 1980s even the Hare Krishnas were into the drug trade and had left a trail of bodies from Twin Peaks in San Francisco to the New York harbor.”
“Somehow I don’t see Trudy being capable of marijuana growing. It’s tough work. Hiking the hills, planting and harvesting.”
“She wasn’t always that way.”
“You mean she didn’t have these symptoms when Anna was growing up?”
“They kicked in later.”
“When?”
Sonny laughed and accelerated down the dirt road. “I’ll let you answer that one yourself.”
It wasn’t until Donnally once again heard the popping gravel that he got it: Trudy hadn’t gone into hiding after the police knocked on her door to question her about Tsukamata, but only after her daughter’s murder in 1986. And her guilt revealed itself, to everyone but herself, in the form of her psychosomatic symptoms.
“You mean it really was R2T2 who killed Anna, trying to find out where the marijuana operation was?” Donnally asked. “And Trudy had once protected the guys who later came back and killed her daughter?”
The question died in the rumbling of tires and grinding of gears, and Sonny answered with his silence.
Donnally was glad that Mauricio’s cowardice had kept him from looking for Anna himself. It had saved him from the truth, and from the tragedy that he’d delivered his sister up to an equally cowardly woman that Anna had sacrificed her life to protect.
He remembered a line spoken by a janitor, leaning on his broom in an army hospital hallway during one of his father’s movies: A hypochondriac is just a sociopath without courage.
That was Trudy Keenan.
And in that moment, Donnally felt sadder for Anna than at any time since he first read her name in Mauricio’s letter.
Chapter 35
