Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  “Were you ever afraid for your life with him?”

  Evie thought about this before answering. “Yeah. I was afraid to leave him, ’cause I didn’t know what he might do. It was a relief when he went to prison and I could go ahead and get a divorce.”

  “What was he convicted of?”

  “Manslaughter. Killed a man outside a bar.”

  “When did that happen?”

  She thought for a few seconds. “1982, maybe? Andy was seven, and Emory would have been five.”

  “But he came back to live with you after he got out.”

  Evie sighed. “Yes—he sweet-talked me into letting him stay with us for a few weeks till he got a job and could get back on his feet, and then I couldn’t get rid of him. He just kind of settled in, started ordering me around like we were still married. I called his parole officer about him, and he called Len in, but Len just slick-talked his way out of it, and then he told me if I did anything like that again he’d have some of his friends take care of me. I thought he could, too. He knew some men—bikers—I guess he must have met them in prison. They’d come by the house sometimes to see him.”

  “So what happened with him?”

  “He took off. Walked out one day while I was at work and the kids were in school. Took all his stuff, left his truck at the Greyhound stop.”

  “Did he ever get in touch after that?”

  “No.”

  “Did you find out where he went?”

  “No. And apparently his biker friends didn’t know, either, because a couple of them came by looking for him once after he’d left. Said he owed them money.”

  Dave asked how she’d decided to move to Shasta City, and she said she had a friend who’d moved there and found work in the county hospital. She had called Evie to tell her about a job opening at the hospital for a bookkeeper. Evie drove down there with the boys. She got the job, signed a lease on an apartment and moved in in the space of two weeks.

  Dave asked some more questions about how they had liked Shasta City and how the boys had done in school. “Can you think of any people who might remember them?” he asked.

  This seemed to stump her. “I have to think,” she said, looking down and a little to one side. After a moment, she looked up and said, “There were a couple of teachers.” She gave their names. “And there was a kid named Eddy that used to come over sometimes to see Andy. Emory had some friends, but I can’t remember their names. They didn’t come around much, ’cause Em knew I didn’t like them. They were a bad crowd, and Emory got involved with them and got himself in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She gave a small shrug. “Oh, breaking into cars, joyriding—that kind of stuff. Some of them were doing drugs. Emory wasn’t much into that, though.” She said the last sentence almost proudly.

  “He went to jail, though, didn’t he?”

  Her mouth grew tense, and she picked up her cup, took a drink of coffee, and put the cup back down on the table before speaking. “Yes. But he was set up by the girl and that so-called friend of his.”

  “What happened?” Dave asked.

  “They said Ron kidnapped the girl and he and Emory raped her. But she was Ron’s ex-girlfriend, and it was all just he-said, she-said, you know? Em told me she stole money and drugs from one of Ron’s friends, and they drove her to someone’s house to get the money to pay him back, and she cried rape to get back at them. Emory pled guilty to false imprisonment, because he was looking at seven years in prison and having to register as a sex offender. He was railroaded, pure and simple.”

  “How long was he in jail?”

  “About eight months. He was supposed to serve a year, but he got early release. After that, the police in Shasta City were always on his case, trying to catch him doing something they could arrest him for. That’s why I moved out to Mr. Johansen’s out in the country—to keep the boys out of trouble.”

  The incident she described had not been presented at Emory’s trial, only the fact of the false imprisonment conviction. A prior rape would have been just the kind of evidence a prosecutor trying for the death penalty would want to put in front of the jury. I asked her. “The prosecution didn’t put on anything about that at Emory’s trial. That’s kind of surprising, under the circumstances.”

  Evie nodded agreement, then stopped for a moment, as if she was trying to recall the trial. “I can’t remember just why they didn’t. Emory’s lawyer told me—oh, yes, she’d died.”

  “Who?”

  “The girl. A drug overdose, I think he said.”

  The tension ebbed from Evie’s face, and she glanced from Dave to me with her usual cheery expression. She reminded me of a bird—bright, inquisitive, and unreadable behind the polished stones of her eyes. She straightened up in her seat, her hands resting on the edge of the table, and looked at Dave, then at me. “Is there anything more you need to know?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, “it would be helpful to know something about your background, your family.”

  Evie’s smile dropped away. “What do you need to know about me for?” she asked. Damn, I thought, baffled by her sudden suspicion. Okay, Dave, do your magic.

  Dave did. “Well, when you’re trying to understand how someone got where he did,” he said, “it helps to know as much as possible about where he came from. Everybody is influenced by the adults who were around them when they were growing up, and those adults have their own stories that explain how they became who they were. So your upbringing—and Len’s, if we can learn about it—may help us find mitigating evidence that might get Andy a new trial.”

  Evie seemed to relax a little when Dave mentioned getting Andy a retrial. “What do you need to know about me, though?”

  Dave took that as an opening. “Let’s start with when and where you were born.”

  “Arkansas,” she said.

  “Where in Arkansas?”

  “Harrison.”

  “Are your family from there?”

  “My mother’s folks were. My father was from Iowa.”

  “Are they still alive?”

  “No, they’ve both passed away.”

  “Did you grow up in Harrison?”

  “No. My dad repaired farm equipment, and we lived in Missouri, Indiana, Nebraska, and then Iowa after he bought a farm there.”

  We picked our way through the details of her life. She was the second of three children. She had an older sister and a younger brother. Her parents and sister had died in an automobile accident, and she had been sent to live with an aunt and uncle, Margaret and Ray Rakowski, in Canfield, Washington. She didn’t know where her brother was. “I haven’t heard anything of him in years. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

  “Did you ever hear where he’d gone after your parents died?”

  “To a mental hospital. That’s all I know.”

  “Did you ever try to find him?”

  “No, I never did.”

  “Do you have any other relatives that you know of?”

  “None living, far as I know. I remember visiting my grandparents in Arkansas once or twice when I was young, but my parents and them weren’t ever close. I don’t think I ever met my Aunt Margaret till she came to take me to Washington.”

  “What about your father’s family?”

  She thought for a moment. “I don’t remember ever hearing anything about them.”

  When she was sixteen, Evie, then Eva Bowden, had married a boy from Canfield, Jimmy Kitteridge. “We had to get married, because I was expecting. But we weren’t suited, really, and we split up after a couple of years.”

  “Was Andy Jimmy’s son, then?”

  “Oh no. Andy and Emory were Len’s kids. Jimmy’s child was Carla.”

  “Carla?” I asked. The name was new to me; I hadn’t seen anything in my reading about Evie having another child.

  “Yeah. She didn’t live with me growing up. After Jimmy and I split up, his parents took care of her. Jimmy got
married again, and then him and his wife—Charlene—raised her after that. Then, when she was fifteen, she decided she wanted to live with me for a while. That was nothing but trouble.”

  “Why?”

  “Lot of arguing and fighting between Len and me and Carla. Carla was Miss Priss, didn’t want to do any work around the house. Then I found out that Len was trying to fool around with her. I caught him, one night, coming out of her bedroom. He tried to say nothing was wrong, but I could tell what was happening from the way he looked. He and I had a terrible row. I told him I was going to tell his parole officer, and he could send all the friends he wanted from prison; I didn’t care. That’s why he left.”

  “Did Carla go with you to Shasta City when you moved?” Dave asked.

  “No—she went back to Jimmy and Charlene, and then she ran away.”

  “What happened to her after that?”

  “She got into drugs. She came to see me a couple of times, and she used to call now and again—usually asking for money. But I haven’t seen her in years. I don’t know what she’s doing now, or where she’s living.”

  “Do you know who might know where she is?”

  “You might ask Jimmy and Charlene. I have an address and phone number for Jimmy.” She looked in her purse, brought out a small address book, leafed through it, and read the information to us.

  I’d been thinking that one of the places we’d have to see was the ranch where the killings had happened. “Tell me,” I asked, “is the place where you all were living when the crimes happened still like it was?”

  Evie shook her head. “I don’t think so. I haven’t been out there since we moved away. Mr. Johansen—the man who lived in the trailer there—he died a long time ago. He owned the ranch. I saw in the paper a while ago that it was sold.”

  Johansen had been living in a house trailer on the property and renting out the house. The police had interviewed him; he was a very old man, hard of hearing and probably a little senile. He said he’d never noticed anything out of the ordinary while the Hardys were living there. I doubted that he’d have told us anything useful if he had lived.

  “Did you stay on at the ranch after Andy and Emory were arrested?”

  “No longer than I had to. I moved into town as soon as I could find a place.”

  “That must have been a rough time for you.”

  “Well, I had to hire a mover. Not that we had that much, but I couldn’t handle it all by myself. It was expensive, too.”

  That was it—nothing about how she had felt about having her two sons arrested for murder and learning that the bodies of their victims were buried in her yard. “Did you have any problems with people over the fact that your boys were charged with this crime?”

  She shook her head. “Not that much. The police came to my work a couple times, but I’ve been there a long time, and my boss didn’t give me any trouble about it. Reporters, too, but after a while, the receptionist knew who they were and chased ’em away. Sometimes they called me at home, but I always said the lawyers didn’t want me talking to them. Most of ’em let it go, but there was one or two came and knocked on my door. I told them if they wasn’t out of my sight in five seconds I’d come after ’em with a shotgun. They got out, okay.” Her face crinkled like an apple doll’s as she laughed, relishing the memory. Then, as if she had turned off a faucet, the laugh stopped, and she shot me a look, checking my reaction.

  I was a little surprised by her sudden shift. “Good for you,” I answered, not knowing what else to say.

  She looked down at her watch and back at us. “It’s getting kind of late. Is there anything more you want to ask about?”

  Dave and I looked at each other, and we both shook our heads. “We shouldn’t keep you,” I said. “You’ve got a long drive.”

  I paid the check, and we walked together out to the parking lot. I watched as she climbed into the high seat of the van, backed it out of its space, and drove off.

  White clouds of fog were rolling across the Marin hills, and a chill sea breeze scoured the parking lot.

  “So, now we’ve met Mama,” I said to Dave, as we hurried, shoulders hunched against the wind, back to my car. “What did you think of her?”

  “I don’t know,” Dave said. “She sure seems loyal to her sons. Won’t hear a negative word about them.”

  “Yeah. She’s probably the most devoted mother of a guy on the row I’ve ever seen. Most of them get a visit from their families once or twice a year, if they’re lucky. But she’s made that trip every month for fifteen years—for Andy and Emory both.”

  I paused. “By the way, I’m sorry about spoiling your day with Marisol.”

  Dave shrugged. “It’s what it is. Did you know anything about that prior of Emory’s?”

  “Just the false imprisonment conviction, not the facts. And I didn’t know anything about Carla. It never occurred to me to ask Andy if he had any sibs besides Emory.”

  “And he didn’t bother to tell you,” Dave said. “There’s always something else out there, no matter how many questions you ask. People hold back the damnedest things.”

  11

  It was true. Investigating an old case often feels like the cliché about peeling an onion; you find layer after layer of information, you cry a lot, and, at the end of it, there’s no core of revealed truth. Okay, so it’s not quite as bad as that; often you can arrive at an educated guess about the truth from different sources giving you overlapping versions of a story. But the interview with Evie had left me feeling that we were still a long way even from a good guess, and I had few ideas about what to try next.

  At home, I let myself in through the kitchen door, greeted by a stiff and sleepy Charlie. It was dark outside; my little house felt chilly, and the missed-call lights on both my telephones were blinking. I cursed them silently and tried to forget them while I put away groceries, fed the animals, and got a fire going in the wood stove.

  There was one voicemail on my home phone and two on my office phone. The home one was Ed, offering to lend me a DVD—a legal thriller I’d never heard of—before he returned it to the library. The other two were recorded messages from the San Quentin operator, saying that an inmate was trying to make a collect call.

  I figured that Ed was really checking in to make sure I was okay, so I called him back to let him know I was home. Then I turned on my computer and checked my email and read the headlines of a couple of online newspapers. My obligations to the outside world fulfilled, I stoked the stove with several hours’ worth of logs and curled up in bed with Charlie and both cats, a cup of hot chocolate with a shot of brandy in it, and an Andrea Camilleri novel, set in a hardboiled modern Sicily, from a small stack of mysteries I’d borrowed the last time the mobile library had stopped at the grade school up the hill.

  * * *

  On Monday morning, I called Corey to tell him I had releases from Evie and give him the names of the schools and hospitals I’d gotten from her. I scanned the releases and emailed them, then walked with Charlie to the mailbox next to the highway to send a set of originals to Jim’s office. Back at the house, I read some more of the trial transcript and spent a half-hour in the garden, weeding and tying up wandering pea runners to trellises Harriet had helped me make from string and bamboo stakes. I had just come inside and washed my hands when the phone rang in my office. I picked it up and heard the recorded voice of the prison operator announcing a collect call, and then Andy’s voice. I accepted the call.

  “Andy, what’s up?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Moodie. I hope you don’t mind my calling you.”

  “No, Andy, of course not.”

  He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I tried a couple of days ago, but you weren’t there. I should have known better. I figured after I called you were probably with Mama still.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Yeah, I figured that. After. Anyway, I just wanted to ask you—uh, did everything go okay?”

  He was fishing for somet
hing, but I couldn’t tell what. “Oh yes,” I answered, working at bland cheeriness. “We found one another in the parking lot with no trouble, and we had a good conversation.”

  “Did you like Mama?”

  I wondered what he expected me to say. “Yes. She seemed very nice. I can tell she cares about you a lot.”

  “I don’t know how I’d make it here without her.” He hesitated for a second before asking, with what I suspected was an attempt at studied casualness, “What did you talk about, anyway?”

  It was time for the lecture on the ethics of investigation. “Oh, Andy, I really can’t say. We have a rule when we’re working on cases that when we interview someone we don’t tell other people what they said, except the lawyers on the defense team.”

  “Why not?”

  “When I talk to someone, I don’t want them to think I’m going to tell other people what they said. Otherwise they might be afraid to be honest with me. You wouldn’t want me telling other people what we talk about, would you?”

  Another brief pause. “But Mama and me, we tell each other everything.”

  I wondered about that. “That may be true, Andy, but I can’t just assume that. If you want to know what Evie said to me, you could ask her, you know.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He sounded disappointed. “But I have to wait till she visits. You all say I’m not supposed to talk about my case on the phone.”

  I wondered what he was so worried about. “Your mother wouldn’t say anything to hurt you.”

  “I know.” He was silent for a few seconds. “I guess I just wondered—did… did she talk about my dad?”

  “C’mon, Andy, that’s getting into what I can’t talk about.”

  “Oh. Right. Sorry.” He hesitated again, as if trying to remember whether there was something else he wanted to say. “I guess that was all. Thank you for talking to me. Is it okay—uh, can I call you again if I need to ask you something?”

  “Sure, Andy. I can’t guarantee I’ll always have an answer, but yes, please feel free to call me.”