“Do you know how we can get hold of Carla?” I asked.
“Not at the moment,” Jimmy said ruefully. “She never seems to stay in one place for more than a few months. Last time we heard from her, she was getting evicted from her apartment. I don’t even remember where she said she was then.”
“She calls sometimes,” Charlene said, “asking about Austin.”
“Yeah, if she calls, I’ll let her know you’d like to talk to her,” Jimmy said. “I think she’d want to help Andy.”
“Is there anyone else around who might have known Evie?” Dave asked.
Charlene and Jimmy both thought a while. “Not many,” Jimmy said. “It’s been so long—people move away, pass on. And Evie didn’t have a lot of friends. She kept herself apart.”
We had spent part of that morning getting microfiche copies of Evie’s school transcript from a secretary who’d probably found us the most interesting thing that had happened to her in months, and the early afternoon at the public library copying parts of old high-school yearbooks and city directories. Dave pulled the copies from his briefcase, and he and Jimmy went over the pages together, as Jimmy recalled teachers and fellow students, sometimes with a funny story, more often with a shake of his head and a comment. “No, he was killed in Vietnam,” about one. “Died ten or so years ago—cancer,” about another. He thought one of their high-school teachers, now retired, still lived in town, and a couple of girls who had been friendly with Evie had married local boys.
Charlene watched them quietly, then said to me, “I’m not much help, I’m afraid. I didn’t grow up here.”
The conversation between Jimmy and Dave wound down, and Dave went back to his chair. I took another sip of iced tea and made small talk while Dave and I gathered our things and stood up to leave. As we were turning to go, I saw a half-dozen photos in frames standing on a side table. “May I look at your pictures?” I asked.
“Sure,” Charlene said. She glided closer to me as I picked one up. “That’s Carla,” she said, “when she was about twenty. She doesn’t look much like that now.” Carla at twenty was a wisp of a thing, with a pretty heart-shaped face, long light-colored hair, and a hopeful smile. I picked up another, a snapshot of a family. “That’s Evie and Len,” Charlene said, her voice a touch cooler, “with Carla and Andy and Emory.” Len was tall and rangy and dark-haired, like Emory. Even in the still photo, he looked like he’d been drinking; there was something a little off-center, not quite under control, in his posture and the tilt of his head and the narrow-eyed half smile with which he looked at the camera.
“So that’s Len,” I said. “Does anyone know what became of him?”
“No, and I couldn’t care less,” Charlene said, with surprising energy. I put the photo down and turned to look at her. “I don’t know if Evie ever told you, but he molested Carla,” she went on. “Carla told me.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I think it had a lot to do with Carla getting into drugs.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I agreed. “That’s an awful thing to happen to a young girl.” I always hate to ask people about the details of sex crimes, but as an investigator, it’s one of the things you have to do. I steeled myself and went on. “Did she tell you what he did?”
Charlene didn’t seem surprised by the question. “She said he’d come up and put his hands under her clothes, push against her, that sort of thing. Once he came into her bedroom drunk in the middle of the night and tried to get her to have sex with him. Laid on top of her.”
Ick. I tried not to grimace. “Did he actually rape her?”
“Not as far as I know. She said she was able to make him go away.”
“Good for her,” I said. “How old was she when he was doing all that?”
“Fifteen, sixteen. It happened when she went to live with them.”
“Live with them?” Although Evie had already told me about this, I was keen to hear Charlene’s side of the story.
“Yeah. She was in high school and fighting with us all the time, and running away. Then she decided she wanted to go live with her mother.”
“She was out of control,” Jimmy said, from the doorway. “She was gonna go anyway, whatever we said, so we called Evie and set things up and drove her there.”
“She came back after a few months,” Charlene added. “She said she felt bad leaving Andy, but she couldn’t stand it there any more.”
We moved toward the door, where Jimmy was waiting. As he opened it, he said, “I don’t know how much help we were, but if there’s anything you’d like to ask us, just give us a call.”
Dave and I thanked him, and shook his hand.
“I hope you can help Andy,” Jimmy said. “I know he did a terrible thing, and between you and me I don’t think he should ever get out—but…” He lowered his voice, as if to keep Charlene from overhearing, “I’ve never really been in favor of the death penalty, to be honest.”
“Me neither,” I said.
He smiled a little, mostly around the eyes. “Well, do what you can for him, and good luck.”
* * *
We ate burgers and fries at a McDonald’s and went back to the motel, where Dave, armed with a laptop and an Internet connection, did address searches for the teachers, schoolmates, and former neighbors whose names we’d gotten from the school records, the library, and our conversation with Jimmy and Charlene.
For the rest of the afternoon we drove the streets of Canfield looking for the people who our searches said still lived there. We kept getting lost: streets meandered off into the woods or ducked off each other at angles so odd they confused even the rental car’s GPS tracker. House numbers were hard to see and sometimes seemed to appear in no particular order. One house we were looking for had a weathered for sale sign in front and looked as though no one had lived there for months. At another, the young man who came to the door said he had just bought the house; he had never heard of the family we asked about. Another, which had come up in Dave’s search as that of one of Evie’s teachers, turned out to be now owned by his son, who told us that his father had retired and moved to Florida. By that time it was dark, and I was weary and discouraged. When Dave suggested breaking for dinner, I gave a silent hallelujah.
There weren’t many restaurant choices in Canfield. The diner where we’d had breakfast was closed for the day, and there didn’t seem to be much else except fast food. We finally found a place with a lighted sign that said STEAKS AND SEAFOOD and a promising number of cars in its parking lot.
Inside, the place was as dim as a cave, with leatherette booths and white tablecloths. A festive crowd of customers were eating and making a buzz of conversation, and there was a heady smell of grilled steak and garlic in the air. Dave leaned down toward me. “Looks like we’ve found the fancy place in town,” he said.
I had a green salad and part of a very good rare steak, charred on its surface from the hot grill. At the end of the meal, when the waitress asked me if I wanted a doggie bag for the rest of my steak, I felt a pang of homesickness for Charlie. A piece of beef like that would make him a very happy dog.
An hour later, I was fast asleep and dreaming in my motel bed, this time of driving endless roads in a town we didn’t have a map for, trying to find someone whose name kept changing as we looked for him.
24
Things went better—sort of—the next day. I woke up early and drafted declarations for Jimmy and Charlene to sign, then printed them on the motel’s printer. The weather had cooled; the pale sky, streaked with torn clouds, carried the feel of autumn and the possibility of rain.
Armed with our yearbook photos of Evie and Jimmy, we resumed our exploration of the length and breadth, such as it was, of Canfield and the farms and wheat fields around it. This time, we found several people on our list. Only one of the retired teachers remembered Evie or even recognized her yearbook photograph. He recalled Evie as a nice, quiet girl, but not much more. “Something happened to her fami
ly; her parents were killed in a car accident or something like that.”
One woman who Jimmy had said had been a friend of Evie’s didn’t remember her at all. But another, a thin woman with tired brown eyes and iron-gray hair in a functional bob, looked at the yearbook photo for a long moment and invited us into her house. She led us through her living room, spotlessly clean but overcrowded with furniture, where a very old woman in a pink print house dress was watching a daytime talk show on the TV, and she encouraged us to sit at the dining table in an alcove between the living room and the kitchen. The table was dark wood, old, but polished to an almost mirror-like shine. Four plastic place mats, cut to imitate lace, were arranged at even intervals around it, and another place mat in the center held a bowl of plastic hydrangeas.
The woman—her maiden name had been Patty Clauson, but her married name was Cuellar—sat down with us. She held the photocopied photo for a long time, looking at it. It trembled, ever so slightly, in her hand. She shook her head slowly and looked up at us. “Oh, lord, how young we were then!” she sighed. “Why are you asking about Evie Bowden? Nothing bad has happened, has it?”
“Not to her—at least, not directly,” I said. “It’s about one of her sons. He’s in prison in California, and we’re looking for information about his background for his appeal.” It was about as much of the truth, I figured, as she would care to have.
“Oh. That’s a shame,” Mrs. Cuellar said. “I didn’t know she’d had any children after Carla. We lost touch after she and Jimmy broke up and she moved to Spokane.”
She put Evie’s photo down. “I don’t know what you’d want to know about her,” she said.
“Just whatever you can remember. What was she like?”
“Nice. A nice girl.”
We waited in polite silence for her to continue. Mrs. Cuellar looked at us for a cue and when none came, she looked at the photograph on the table and then back up at us. “She was friendly to me. When no one else was.” Her hands moved a little, nervously, on the table. “My dad drank and was in and out of jail a lot. The kids at school knew about him—everyone did—and some of them were cruel. You know how kids can be. Evie was kind of rejected by them, too. And we hung together. She used to laugh about it, said we both had bad blood.”
“What was hers?” I asked.
“She said her brother was in a mental hospital and everyone thought she was crazy, too.” Before either of us could say anything, she went on. “I don’t know if it was true or not.”
“Did she ever talk about what had happened to her parents?”
“I knew they’d passed away. That’s why she was living with her aunt and uncle. I think I heard they were in a car wreck.”
“Did you ever hear any rumor about her parents being murdered?” I asked.
“Murdered?” She looked startled for a second, but then a thought seemed to come to her. “Oh my goodness, I’d forgotten all about that.”
“About what?”
“One of the boys started a rumor that Eva had killed her family. Really cruel, mean stuff, I think just because she’d come from outside. They were the kids that picked on us; a couple of them used to call her Lizzie Borden—you know, like ‘Lizzie Borden took an ax, and gave her father forty whacks.’”
“That must have been terrible for her,” I said.
“Yeah. I’m sure it hurt her, but she never let it show. We both knew that if they could see it was getting to you, they’d just pick on you more. She was tougher than me. Sometimes I’d cry when they’d pick on me, but she never did.”
“Did she ever say anything to you about what happened to her parents?”
“I don’t remember her ever talking about them. She might have—it was a long time ago,” Mrs. Cuellar said, with an apologetic shake of her head.
She sighed a deep sigh, and looked up at the ceiling and then back down. “So much has probably happened to both of us since then. See? She has a son in prison—and I didn’t even know she had one at all.”
I gave her my business card and asked her if she knew of anyone else in the area who might have known Evie when they were young. She thought for a moment, but the only name she came up with was the other woman we’d seen that morning, who hadn’t remembered Evie. “And Jimmy’s still here, but I guess you’ve already talked to him. No—Evie and I didn’t really have many friends back then. I really felt so much like I didn’t belong—it’s hard to believe sometimes that I’ve been here all these years. I guess Evie might still be, too, if she and Jimmy had stayed together.”
At the door, she asked us to say hello to Evie for her. She stood at the door until we were in our rental car and waved goodbye to us as we drove off.
“Well,” Dave said, as we headed down the street, “I think we’ve about exhausted Canfield. Shall we mosey on over to Idaho?” Dave’s miraculous databases had found a sister of Len’s, Gladys, married name Clancy, in a town in the Idaho Panhandle. Before leaving, we stopped at the social services office to meet Charlene and get her signature on her declaration, and then headed to their house to get Jimmy’s.
“You sure got everything, just like I told you,” he said after reading the declaration, and he signed it slowly and carefully, like a man who wasn’t used to writing his name.
25
The drive into Idaho was a long one on lonely highways, east and then north. The landscape changed from rolling wheat fields to woods, and the sky grew darker and more gray.
It was late afternoon, and rain was falling lightly and intermittently, as if the sky itself could hardly make the effort, when we reached the place we were looking for, one of a string of small fishing resorts along the edge of a long, pine-fringed lake. There wasn’t much to any of them—bait store, gas station, launching ramp, a cluster of vacation cabins. The address we had turned out to be in a trailer park dishearteningly called “Voyage’s End.” There was a roofed shelter with mailboxes at the entrance, and Dave got out and read the names on them until he found the one we were looking for. “Space D-12,” he said as he slid back into the driver’s seat.
A tired-looking dark red Ford Explorer stood in the little driveway in front of space D-12. We parked on the other side of the gravel road. Outside the car, I pulled on my jacket, shivering; we were well north of Canfield, and the damp air felt like autumn. High above us, the wind sighed in the pine branches.
The trailer house looked as though it had been there a long time. Its aluminum trim was oxidized, the white and turquoise blue of its paint chalky and faded. A step of weathered wood stood before the metal door; we climbed onto it and knocked. A television blared inside, playing what sounded like Wheel of Fortune.
I heard footsteps, then the rattle of a chain latch. The door opened, and a gray-haired woman in jeans and a violet sweatshirt looked out at us, obviously startled to see strangers on her doorstep.
“Hello?” she asked. I had the feeling she was sure we had come to the wrong house.
“Mrs. Clancy?” Dave asked.
“Yes?” she answered, a little hesitant. I saw her sizing us up, factoring our ages, how we were dressed, and the notebook under my arm into a quick calculation whether it was safe to keep talking with us.
I’d tucked a business card into my jacket pocket, to have it handy, and I pulled it out and offered it to her. As she reached out, a little hesitantly, to take it, I introduced myself and Dave. “I’m a criminal defense attorney, and we’re working for the defense in a case involving your brother Leonard’s son.”
She stopped reading the business card and looked back at us in questioning surprise. “Good heavens,” she said. “You’ve come all the way out here?”
“Well, yes,” I said.
“Well,” she echoed. “I don’t know what you want from me, but you might as well come in.” As we followed her into a tiny, crowded living room that smelled of cigarette smoke, cooking, and cats, she continued, “I don’t know how much I’d have to say to you. I haven’t seen Len in forty years. I
knew he had a couple of kids, but I never met ’em. Here, push some of those papers away and have a seat. Just put ’em on the floor—yeah, that’s fine.”
She sat down on a brown tweed sofa. Dave motioned me to the only armchair and sat on a straight-backed chair next to the couch. As I approached the chair, a calico cat jumped from its arm and ran lightly toward the kitchen. A dark tabby cat jumped from somewhere on the floor onto Mrs. Clancy’s lap, looked at us, and then leapt off and vanished again under the coffee table.
The seat of the armchair seemed to sag almost to the floor, as I tried, not very successfully, to make a graceful descent into it. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?” Mrs. Clancy said. We shook our heads, and she pulled a cigarette from a pack on the table in front of her. “Can I get you some coffee? It’s a fresh pot.” Coffee sounded good to both of us, and Mrs. Clancy disappeared into the kitchen, emerging a few minutes later with three mismatched mugs, which she set on the coffee table. She ducked back into the kitchen and came out again holding a carton of milk, a sugar bowl, and three spoons.
“Don’t know what you take in yours,” she said, after settling herself on the sofa and picking up one of the cups. “I drink it black myself. You’re lucky I was here. I run the market and bait store down on the highway, but business was so slow I decided to leave my clerk in charge and come on home early. It’s pretty dead here this time of year—ain’t nothin’ goin’ on till ice-fishing season starts.”
I felt at a loss where to begin. “I wonder if you can tell us about Leonard and what he was like when he was young.”
“Hoo, boy,” she said, shaking her head, “not a lot. He’s six years older than me. I was only about ten when he left home for good.”
“Sixteen is pretty young. Was there a reason why he left?” I asked.
She picked up her coffee cup and drank, then put it back down. “Oh, a lot of things, I guess. He and my dad fought all the time. Leonard was always in trouble, and my dad was pretty hard on him. Leonard ran away a few times, and once he just didn’t come back.”
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