Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  * * *

  We were finished with the exhibits by lunchtime. Jim called the district attorney’s office to make sure our appointment was still on, while I arranged with Mr. Ferris to have photocopies made of some of the papers and photos.

  Jim treated Dave and me to lunch at a restaurant a block or so from the courthouse—one of those old-fashioned places lawyers and businessmen seem to like, with a full bar and cushioned banquettes. As we walked there, the air above the sidewalk felt like the inside of a clothes drier. No wonder the people up here think they’re tough, I thought. The combination of blast-furnace summers and mountain winters would have culled the weak from among the early settlers.

  A little after one, Jim and I said goodbye to Dave as he left on his search for police and property records, and walked over to the district attorney’s office, in the courthouse annex. It seemed the county was trying to economize with air conditioning, and the tiny waiting room, bland as a doctor’s office, was cooled just enough to feel vaguely uncomfortable. A cheap table fan on the floor behind one of the chairs made a barely discernible movement of air in the room.

  The young woman who greeted us at the receptionist’s window was blond and thin, with a face a little too long to be generically pretty. We told her we had an appointment with Deputy District Attorney Ibarra, and she made a phone call and told us he’d be right out.

  Roberto Ibarra came out the door within a minute. He was fairly short—about five foot seven—and looked to be in his mid-thirties. He shook hands with each of us, and held the door as we walked into the suite. “Everything is in the library,” he said, “this way.”

  We followed him in single file. Offices lined the window walls, and secretaries and paralegals worked in cubicles in the central area, among rows of file cabinets and bookshelves.

  As we walked, Ibarra explained, “We made copies of the tapes and scanned all the paper files we have except the work product material. I hope it’s all here, but the case is really old. Ross Dannemeier retired before I started here.”

  “How did you get assigned to pull the files?” Jim asked.

  “Murder case I was working on settled just before you called, so I was the one with some free time. Lucky me.” He shrugged. “Actually, my secretary did all the work of getting them from storage and having them scanned. All I had to do was go through and pull out Dannemeier’s notes.”

  He showed us into the library, which seemed to double as a conference room, judging from the long table down its center. Tall bookshelves of dark wood, filled with law books, lined three walls. Most of the fourth wall was a floor-to-ceiling window shaded with vertical blinds.

  On the table sat eight banker’s boxes labeled with the names HARDY, M. AND E. and the Supreme Court number of the case; a little apart from them was another box holding a dozen cassette tapes and a couple of CDs in paper envelopes.

  Ibarra picked up a thin file folder and turned to Jim. “This is what I pulled out,” he said. “I can’t copy it for you, but I thought you might want to see that it’s all just notes, nothing else.”

  Jim leaned over while Ibarra opened the folder and riffled through the sheets of yellow legal paper inside it. He nodded, and Ibarra closed the folder. Work product—an attorney’s private notes and memos reflecting his thinking about the case—was something neither side had to give to the other in discovery proceedings. True, we had only Ibarra’s word that that’s what was in the folder, unless Jim wanted to insist that Ibarra itemize it in a privilege log and ask a judge to read it and see whether he was telling the truth. All that would come later, if Jim filed a formal motion. For now, it seemed we had plenty to keep us busy, and it was unlikely that the thin folder of notes had anything in it we needed right away.

  We spent the next half-hour or so looking through the boxes and comparing what was in them to an inventory Corey had made of Dobson’s case files. Dobson’s files, when he gave them to Mark Balestri, had been a mess. Between alcoholic disorganization and moving his office a year or so after the trial, he had lost a lot of his papers from Andy’s case. When Mark Balestri had driven to Shasta City to meet him and pick up his files, what Dobson had found to give him was piled, in no particular order, in three boxes. When Corey had described them to me over the phone, I could almost see him rolling his eyes: two boxes of transcripts and another one of draft motions, parts of police reports, notes on yellow legal pads, loose papers, and file folders whose labels didn’t relate half the time to what was in them.

  When we’d finished, Jim took our box of tapes, and Ibarra led us back to the elevators.

  As we emerged into the sun and the baking sidewalk in front of the building, Jim said, “Do you still feel up to driving out to the ranch?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll call Dave.” He pulled out his cellphone, while I went to fetch my car. He seemed more into the case than I’d expected, and I began to figure him for one of those trial lawyers who are at their best when they can see the physical evidence and meet witnesses face to face. A lot of them, it seems to me, are like that: impatient with reading and organizing information, and much more at home in court and in the field. I’m not that kind of lawyer, never have been, which is why I ended up doing appellate work and being the backup on legal teams.

  My husband Terry had been one of the rare trial lawyers who did both types of work well, who spent evenings and weekends poring over the minutiae in police and lab reports and reading technical articles on forensic evidence, but who also shone in negotiations and in court. He wasn’t flashy: in court, he came across as low-key and controlled; his brilliance came through in the way he seemed to have prepared for every contingency and to be a step ahead of the prosecutor at every turn of the trial. Judges were impressed by his encyclopedic knowledge of the law and the facts of his case. Jurors came to believe his evidence and arguments after seeing that whenever the prosecutor or a witness disagreed with him he was always right. On the other hand, judges and jurors also like lawyers with the type of high energy and charm that Jim possessed. I imagined he did well in trial.

  15

  The ranch where the Hardys had lived was about twenty miles from Shasta City. The road out of town tracked the growth of the city, passing old, tree-lined neighborhoods, strip malls, newer subdivisions behind sound walls, country markets, junk yards, dive bars with dirt parking lots, tired motels, Assembly of God and Jehovah’s Witness churches, and farms, until it became a two-lane highway winding through the Sierra foothills. Cattle or sheep grazed on straw-colored hills dotted with dark green oak trees and outcroppings of gray rock, and once in a while a rutted dirt road made a pale gray line from the highway to a distant compound of ranch buildings—usually a long, low barn, sheds, an original white Victorian farmhouse, and a mid-twentieth-century house where the family now lived. Here and there, dense stands of green brush marked the channels of invisible creeks. The glare of the afternoon sun leached the colors from the landscape.

  We crossed another highway with a sign for Redbud, where Evie lived now, and then passed a place marked on the map as Johnston, which consisted of a bar, a market, a hardware store, and a few houses hidden behind peeling picket fences and overgrown trees. At the far end, opposite a deserted gas station, we made a right turn down a smaller road.

  The area had been mostly ranch land when the Hardys lived here, but that had changed. Now there were fences along the road and a new driveway every few hundred feet, and new houses, barely visible, set well back from the road among tall oak and pine trees. There were white fences, prefab barns, and paddocks, some with horses, and some of the driveways had barred gates. A couple of miles down, the road crossed a culvert, and a graveled track led off to the left. The house number, on a sign below the mailbox at the entrance, told us that this was the place we were looking for.

  “11734,” Jim read. “What did they call this—the Cantwell ranch?”

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “But I don’t think the Cantwells had owned it for a l
ong time. The old man who rented the house to Evie was named Peter Johansen.”

  “He’s not still here, is he?” Jim asked.

  “No,” Dave answered. “He died a couple of years after the trials. I looked up the property records today; the ranch was sold in a probate sale and then sold again, to a Carl and Emily Bolton. Husband and wife.”

  The gravel road had a gate, but it was open. Manzanita and coyote bushes lined both sides of the track, but a strip of shoulder on each side was cleared of brush and seemed to have been mowed fairly recently. The road curved to the left, and we emerged from the bushes into a large clearing, where the road ended, making a circle around a huge old walnut tree. To its right was a stretch of mowed grass, with a row of young evergreen trees along it and a new prefabricated shed behind them; past that and ahead of us stood an old apple orchard. Behind that, the ground rose into a low hill, planted with young grapevines.

  The house and a two-car garage, both newly painted pale yellow with white trim, were on the left. The house was a nineteenth-century farmhouse, two stories high, with a peaked roof with two gables and a bit of gingerbread woodwork along the eaves. The garage—a Lexus SUV parked in front of one of the doors—looked as though it had once been a carriage house.

  A golden retriever ran to the edge of the driveway and stood twenty feet away from us, barking. Behind it, a man and woman walked toward us around the side of the house.

  “Can I help you?” the man said, as he came within earshot. He was gray-haired, but trim and fit-looking, in jeans and a pale green polo shirt. The woman, ash-blond hair under a straw gardening hat and white shirt tucked into faded jeans, hung back a dozen or so feet behind him.

  Jim was the first out of the car. He walked over to the man and said a few words, then they shook hands, and all three of them looked over at us. Dave and I took that as a signal to join them, shaking hands with the couple. The man introduced himself. “I’m Carl Bolton; this is my wife Emily.”

  After we exchanged names, he continued his conversation with Jim. “Yes, I knew about it. The realtor told us, and people in town mention it sometimes. Terrible, really. But to get to your question, I’m not sure where the bodies were buried; Carol, our realtor, wasn’t sure herself. She thought a clearing in the woods beyond the orchard. We walked out there with her once—I guess morbid curiosity got the better of us. But there isn’t anything to see any more. It’s all grown over.”

  “We have some photographs of the site and a map from an old police report,” Jim said, “but it looks like this area has changed quite a bit since then.” He looked around, approving. “This is a nice-looking place; you must have really fixed it up.”

  “Thanks,” the man said. “We bought it a few years ago, with the idea of retiring here someday. Did a lot of work on it. We live in Sacramento, and we’re usually only here on weekends. You’re lucky you caught us.”

  Jim was leafing through a stack of crime-scene photos as he listened. He pulled one out and showed it to Carl. “Here’s a shot from a distance, shows the barn in the background. Do you know where that might be?”

  Carl bent down to look at it, looked up again, and pointed. “It was over there, behind where the storage shed is. We had the barn torn down, I’m afraid. It was in bad shape, and Emily said it gave her the willies.” He looked at his wife solicitously.

  Emily caught his eye and took her cue to speak, looking at each of us with a practiced social gaze. “I feel silly saying it,” she said, with an apologetic half-smile, “but I really did feel like there were ghosts in that barn.”

  “It looked that way, for sure. The whole place was pretty rundown,” Carl said, with a proprietary sweep of his arm. “If you want to look around, I’ll walk with you out back, where Carol thought the bodies were found.”

  We crossed the oval made by the driveway, then walked along the orchard’s edge. Carl pointed toward the grapevines. “That all used to be pasture land,” he said. “There’s a creek over there, and a lot of brush grows around it.” He turned and followed a dusty, rutted tractor path along the edge of the vineyard. To our left was a verge of mowed grass, yellow and dry, and beyond that a leaning old fence of narrow wooden slats.

  A couple hundred feet down the track Carl stopped at a break in the fence. Beyond it I could see a few oak trees, and beyond them the creekside brush. Carl stopped and turned toward the grove of trees. “This is where she said they were. Careful—there’s some poison oak in there.”

  There wasn’t much to see, just a sun-dappled clearing surrounded by oak trees. Dead leaves and years of winter rains had smoothed over any disturbance in the contour of the earth that might have shown where a grave had been dug out. The shadows of the trees around the clearing were lengthening into it, but the air was hot and still except for an occasional puff of wind—hardly a breeze—that lifted more than moved it.

  Thinking of the history of the place and the crime-scene photos, perhaps I ought to have felt something—a chill, a catch in the throat. But I didn’t. It was just a clearing. Cows in the old pasture had probably gathered in its shade on hot afternoons. Children might have played in it, high-school kids might have sat there, none the wiser, smoking pot and drinking beer. When you thought about it, human history was full of such places. People have killed and buried each other in the woods for millennia, and the forest, after a few years, covers all the evidence, taking it back to itself.

  Dave pulled out his phone and began shooting pictures. Emily spoke, her voice lowered. “It’s funny, but I’ve never felt odd out here. Not like the barn.”

  “Do you need to see any more?” Carl asked politely. I sensed that he, at least, was impatient to leave the spot.

  We followed him and Emily back out of the clearing. Carl said, “I understand that these men on death row need lawyers, but to be honest, I don’t know how you defend those people.”

  Jim gave him the thirty-second answer. “Someone has to stand up for the underdog,” he said. “And I’ve never believed in the death penalty—at least, not as long as I’ve been a lawyer.”

  “Seems to me they gave it to the right people this time,” Carl said.

  We walked through the orchard, picking our way over the ploughed, uneven ground between the trees. Back at our car, we thanked the Boltons. “No problem,” Carl said. As we drove around the circle and headed out toward the highway, he and Emily turned and walked together, heads bent in conversation, back around the house. Growing old together. I felt a twinge of resentment.

  “Nice place,” Dave said, as we drove back down the road toward Johnston.

  “Too remote for me,” Jim answered. “I can’t imagine living someplace so isolated. As a crime-scene view, that was kind of a waste of time, don’t you think?”

  “We had to do it, though,” Dave said. “You never can tell. Pity they pulled the barn down.”

  “Well, what now, kids?” Jim asked. “Anything else we can do here before heading back to town?”

  “I figured I’d stay another day or two,” Dave said. “I have addresses for the bailiff and a couple of other people, and I may be able to track down some teachers.”

  “Unless you need me to stay,” I said to him, “I think I’ll drive home tomorrow morning. Maybe do some research at the library tonight, if it’s open.”

  “It is,” Dave said. “I’m headed there myself.”

  “I have a ticket on an eight o’clock flight tonight,” Jim said. “Gotta be in court tomorrow at nine.”

  The conversation turned back to the couple at the ranch. “Nice to have that kind of money,” Jim said.

  “What do you suppose he does?” Dave asked.

  “He’s a doctor,” Jim said. “Sports medicine. He told me he’s the doctor for the—” Jim recited the name of some team I didn’t recognize, and he and Dave launched into a conversation about sports.

  I played solitaire on my phone.

  16

  The Shasta City main library had been a classic Carnegie
library, but the original building was now a children’s wing, enfolded and dwarfed by a larger modern annex. The familiar smell of books and copy-machine toner permeated the cool air inside, and the carpeted floors and rows of bookcases absorbed the small sounds of people working at the counters and tables. At the reference desk, Dave got directions to the newspaper archives on microfilm, and I asked for high-school yearbooks. The librarian, a pretty dark-haired woman, led me to a locked case. “We have most of the yearbooks from Shasta City High, back to 1940, I think. Do you know which years you want?”

  I’d been doing rapid arithmetic in my head, trying to calculate the years when Andy and Emory would have been in high school. “Let’s see—1989 through 1996 I think.” She bent down and ran her finger along the shelf of tall, narrow books, in various shades of fake-leather binding. From them she pulled out eight and handed them to me.

  I sat down at a table nearby, stacked the yearbooks to my right and pulled a steno pad and pen from my shoulder bag. I took the top one from the stack and opened it. It was called The Mountaineer, the title sketched on the cover in gold leaf script above a few lines that suggested, in a minimalist way, the contours of an alp and a hiker with a Swiss-style hat and a staff.

  Inside, I looked for photos of Andy and Emory and the people Andy had named as his friends, among class pictures, group shots of athletic teams and clubs, and the little individual portraits of seniors. It was sobering to look at them, so young, smooth-skinned, and pretty or gangly, with their nervous smiles or tense stares into the camera, their outdated clothing and hairstyles. I wondered what life had brought to Billy Hofscheier, looking stolidly out from the page from under a blond crew cut, or Cecilia Cuevas, with her sharp, small face and forward-swept hair. They’d be heading into middle age now, having, most of them, set the course for their lives. Working at the job they’d retire in, maybe, or taking over their parents’ business or ranch, raising kids as old now as they were in these pictures. Or drinking too much and watching their lives turn into a bitter parody of whatever they had dreamed of at seventeen; or falling into the lowest circle of drugs and jail. Oh, come on, I told myself; most of them would be pretty content with how things were turning out for them. They’d be getting a bit broad in the face and thicker in the waist, living in clean, well-kept houses with comfortable furniture, doing household projects or going fishing or camping on the weekends, volunteering for their churches, helping out their parents, worrying about their kids. Solid people. Baffled—if they thought about it—that anyone like Andy or Emory could have walked among them.