Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  “I don’t see any reason to talk about it,” she said.

  When I begged her again to rethink her decision and told her Andy would probably lose his appeals and be executed if he didn’t go through with the evaluation, she listened without a word. When I’d finished, she said, “I know what’s right and wrong with my boys. You need to find some other way besides telling lies about Andy.”

  So I made an appointment to see Andy the next week, and wrote to him to tell him I was coming. He refused the visit. When I got home that day, there was a letter from him in my mailbox, dated two days earlier. In blocky printing, he had written,

  I DO NOT WANT TO SEE YOU OR DR MOOS.

  I AM NOT A RETARD OR CRAZY, AND THER

  IS NOTHING WRONG WITH MY MIND.

  I wrote him another letter, struggling to think of what to say to him. “I know your mother loves you,” I tried, “but her advice will hurt her as much as you. She would be very sad if you lost your appeals and were executed, because she would lose you. If you let Dr. Moss do his testing, he may be able to tell the judge something that will get you a new trial and save your life.”

  I made another appointment, drove again to San Quentin to see him, and again he wouldn’t see me. To keep the trip from being a complete waste, I also scheduled a holiday visit the same morning to my ex-client Henry Fontaine, who, sensing I was anxious and down over something, plied me with evangelical encouragements and advice to find comfort in the Lord, gave me copies of some hymns he had written, and went on in detail about the prison doctors’ attempts to adjust his medication and the various symptoms that had worsened each time. Nevertheless, I was cheered enough by his “you have a merry Christmas, Ms. Janet, and don’t let the things of the world get you down,” and his final smile and wave as he was led through the iron door, that I took Andy’s refusal, when it came, with a resigned sigh and went home to try to follow Henry’s advice.

  Because it was, after all, the holiday season, I wrapped and mailed Christmas presents for my sisters and their husbands and kids (I had sent Gavin’s by sea mail in October) and shopped for things for my few friends—Ed, Harriet, Bill, Dave. To ward off the darkness of the winter and my thoughts, I put up strings of multicolored lights outdoors and in, around the front door and living-room windows and framing the doorway to the kitchen. I bought a little potted spruce tree and set it up on the coffee table with lights and miniature ornaments.

  When I had the heart for it, I continued drafting the petitions, feeling acutely and painfully the huge gap that would have been filled by Dr. Moss’s results. Even if he had not found that Andy was mentally retarded, his evaluation would almost certainly have shown that Andy’s intelligence was low, and he would have been able to use his personal evaluation of Andy, the information from Andy’s school records, and the statements of the people who had known him, to explain Andy’s limitations and his personality. Without the concrete information from his observations and tests, we didn’t have much except speculation. And when it came out—as it had to at some point—that Andy himself had refused to cooperate with the defense’s expert, there was probably no judge sitting who wouldn’t hold that against him.

  It occurred to me to call Carla, in the hope that Andy had kept a lifeline open to her, but when I called the halfway house, my call was transferred to a counselor who told me Carla was no longer there. When I asked how I could reach her, she gave me the name and phone number of Carla’s probation officer.

  The probation officer, citing confidentiality, wouldn’t tell me where she was until I emailed him a copy of Carla’s records release. After receiving it, he called back and told me she had just completed the residential part of the drug program and was living on her own. He gave me a number he said was her cellphone. “She applied for permission to make a visit over Christmas to her father and stepmother in Washington,” he added. “That was a couple of days ago. I just approved it today.”

  I called the phone number he’d given me and got an automated message. Then I called Jimmy and Charlene.

  Jimmy answered. “How are you doing?” he asked. “We’ve been thinking about you, Charl and I, wondering how you’re doing with Andy’s case.”

  “Not so well,” I said, and without stopping to elaborate, I went on. “I’m really sorry to bother you so close to the holidays and all…”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’re pretty quiet here.”

  “I heard that Carla is coming up there for a visit,” I said.

  “That’s true,” Jimmy said. “She’s coming on the bus. I’m supposed to pick her up in Walla Walla tomorrow. I wish I’d known sooner; we’d a bought her a plane ticket. But we couldn’t find anything we could afford this close to Christmas. Do you need to talk to her? I’ll tell her to call you when she gets in.”

  “That would be great,” I said.

  “She was in the hospital last month—her liver,” Jimmy went on. “She must be doing better now, ’cause the doctor okayed her coming up here. But she was feelin’ pretty bad for a while. She wanted to see us and Austin this Christmas, be near her family.”

  That didn’t sound good. “I hope she’s feeling better,” I said. “And ask her to call me, if you would, please—it’s about Andy.”

  “Sure will,” Jimmy said. “He’s okay, I hope.”

  “Oh, yes,” I lied.

  “Glad to hear it. Well, Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I said, feeling how uncomfortably the syllables fell from my mouth.

  * * *

  Carla called two days later.

  “I’d have called when I got in,” she said, “but I was too tired.”

  “How are you doing?” I asked. “I heard you were in the hospital.”

  “Pretty bad,” she said. “They thought I might have liver cancer, but it turned out to be a false alarm.”

  “Yikes!” I said, sympathizing. “That must have been a scare.”

  “Yeah. I’m not ready to kick it just yet. I quit smoking, though. Hardest thing I’ve done in my life so far. So what’s up with Andy?”

  I told her. After I’d finished, there was silence on the line for a few seconds before she said, quietly, “Shit, Mama.” She said nothing else for a second or two, then asked, “What can I do?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I guess you can’t get into the prison to see Andy.”

  “No, I asked. I’m on probation for a drug conviction, and I guess that’s the end of it, as far as they’re concerned. I’ll write to him, though, tell him to see you and cooperate.”

  “That might help,” I said.

  “Maybe if I talked to Mama—”

  “Do you think it would do any good?”

  “I don’t know. I may as well try. I don’t want to see Andy hurt.”

  “Do you have any idea why she’s so against him getting evaluated?”

  “She never wanted to believe that there was anything wrong with Andy,” Carla said.

  “We’d have to go up to Redbud,” I said. “I asked to meet her down here, and she said no.”

  “Okay.”

  We arranged to talk on the phone after Carla was back in California, and I wished her a merry Christmas. “Take care of yourself,” I added.

  After that, there wasn’t much else for me to do, except take everyone’s advice and try to enjoy the holidays.

  Not that there was much to be merry about. The courts have a Scrooge-like disrespect for the Christmas season, and after another unsuccessful try to visit Andy and holiday visits to a couple more former clients, I spent several ten-hour days finishing the reply brief in a non-capital appeal that had to be filed by December 23. Dave hadn’t been able to get an affordable flight to Davenport, Iowa, until New Year’s Eve. “Seems like as good a day as any,” he’d said, when I commiserated. “I don’t generally do anything on New Year’s Eve any more; do you?” I wondered where Marisol was these days, but didn’t want to ask.

  32

  I spent Christmas do
ling out holiday dinners again with Bill and Harriet because it was better than staying home alone. Two days later, I woke up with chills and a fever. My throat was sore, my head felt as though someone was hitting it repeatedly with a cymbal, and all my bones felt clenched with pain. I spent the next couple of days sleeping as much as I could, leaving my bed only to use the bathroom and make an occasional cup of weak, sweet tea.

  On the thirtieth, Dave called for a last-minute briefing on his trip to Iowa to investigate the murders of Evie’s family, the Bowdens. “You sound awful,” he said, after the first sentence I tried to speak.

  “I’m a goner; you’ll have to go on without me,” I croaked, then coughed and cursed exhaustedly as the muscles in my raw throat contracted.

  “I hate to laugh; you sound so miserable,” he said. “I’ll call as soon as I find out anything.”

  * * *

  By New Year’s Day I was feeling a lot better. I called Dave on his cellphone, figuring that a motel in Iowa was a pretty cheerless place to ring in the new year. Dave told me he was staying in the county seat, a town called Commerce, about ten miles from Corydon, and the weather was actually pretty nice, cold, with a lot of snow on the ground, but sunny. “It’s a pretty sad place, though,” he said. “Most of the buildings downtown are boarded up. I guess the only thing that keeps it going are the county offices. I drove out to Corydon this morning, and there’s nothing left there at all. Even the church is closed.” He had spent New Year’s Eve at a sports bar near the courthouse, among a festive crowd of locals. He had mentioned to a couple of people that he was investigating a murder that had taken place in Corydon in the 1960s. No one there remembered anything about it, but his story had created a certain interest. “People assumed I was writing some sort of true crime book, and everyone was interested in helping out.” He had gotten leads to some potentially useful resources—the local historical society, the names of some of the local newspapers.

  The next afternoon I was working on a brief at my computer when Dave called.

  “Well,” he said, and I could hear the satisfaction in his voice, “I’ve found out more about the murders.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Here’s what happened. A guy named Steve Persson heard I was asking about the Bowden murders on New Year’s Eve and asked his father about them. His father’s a retired deputy sheriff. He was in the department when they happened, and he remembered the case. Steve got hold of my cellphone number from a friend of his who’d gotten one of my business cards—I guess I was handing them out pretty freely. Anyhow, he called me on my cell and invited me to meet his dad.

  “I spent this morning in the county library looking for newspaper articles about the case. It was a big story at the time, as you might guess, so there was quite a bit of coverage, a dozen pieces at least.

  “Then this afternoon I met Steve at his father’s place. The elder Mr. Persson was a young deputy then—he’s in his mid-seventies, I’d say—and he remembered a good deal about the case. ‘It wasn’t something you forget,’ he said. ‘It was our own In Cold Blood, you might say.’

  “The Bowden family lived on a farm outside of Corydon. Mr. Persson said Robert Bowden was a little eccentric; he was some sort of religious fanatic, a lay preacher. The two girls went to high school in Commerce; Persson had a younger sister who was classmates with the older girl, Evie’s sister Susan. The boy, Bob Bowden, Jr., wasn’t in school because he was feebleminded.”

  “Really!”

  “Yeah. Made me think of Andy and his nephew—Austin, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyhow, the story as Mr. Persson remembered it was that Evie showed up in the middle of the night at a neighboring farm and woke the people there. It was winter, and she had walked all the way there in her nightgown with a coat over it. She told them something had happened at her parents’ place and her parents, sister, and brother had been shot. The Bowdens didn’t have a phone. The neighbor and his oldest boy drove over there and found the bodies. Father, mother, and the other girl were all dead. Bob, Jr. was shot, too, but he was alive.

  “As Persson remembered it, the police and the prosecutor pieced the story together from Evie’s account and the crime scene. What happened, it seems, was that Evie’s father went crazy and shot his wife Marilyn and his daughter Susan with a shotgun in the kitchen of the house. Evie and Bob, Jr. were upstairs asleep, but were wakened by the screaming and gunshots. Evie ran to her parents’ room and got a .38 pistol her father kept loaded on a shelf in the closet. She heard him coming up the stairs yelling for her and Bob. Bob came to the door of his room, and her father shot him and then reloaded and started looking around for her. As he was standing in the upstairs hallway, she shot him with the pistol. Not just once, either. She emptied the chamber, all six rounds. Mr. Persson remembered that detail, because it kind of shocked everyone. ‘Once or twice you could see,’ he said. ‘But to keep shooting like that after the man was down. It was the coldness of it, the calculation.’”

  “Actually, it sounds like a panic reaction,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought, too, but I guess it didn’t occur to anyone then. Anyhow, there was a big investigation because the prosecutor was trying to decide whether to bring a case against her in juvenile court. The neighbor whose house she went to said she’d seemed real cool-headed when she was there, not as upset as he figured a child should be under the circumstances.”

  “How did she know how to shoot a gun like that?” I asked. A .38 was a lot for a child to handle.

  “Interesting question. I guess they asked how she knew the gun was on the shelf, and she said her father had taught all the kids to shoot, rifles and handguns, and she’d seen her father take that one from the closet before. Some of this was in the newspapers, too, because it came out at the inquest. But there was another detail that didn’t make it into the papers. Probably too scandalous for the times.”

  “What was that?”

  “The autopsy of Susan showed she was about four months pregnant. The police tried to find who the father was, to see if Susan had a boyfriend who could shed some light on what was going on in the family. But they didn’t find anyone. Everyone who knew the family said both girls were extremely well behaved, and their parents kept them on a tight leash. They never went to any dances or even after-school activities like sports. No one ever saw Susan show an interest in any boy, or vice versa. If anything, the other kids more or less shunned her and Evie because they were a little odd and dressed strangely. So with that and the other facts the police were learning about the family—the father’s craziness, the family’s strangeness and isolation—they began to suspect the worst. Mr. Persson didn’t know what Evie told them, if anything, but the upshot was, the state dropped everything, called the killing of the father self-defense, and let Evie go live with her aunt in Washington.”

  “And Bob ended up dying in a mental hospital in Davenport.”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, it does shed some light on Evie. God, what an awful story.”

  Dave made a grunt of agreement. “I’m going to check around tomorrow to see if I can find any police reports or court records from the case, and then see if I can get hold of records from the state hospital in Davenport. Apparently, it’s still in operation.”

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “Any movement on Andy’s part?”

  “Nothing. I haven’t heard a word from him.”

  “Damn.”

  33

  Carla would be back from Washington, I thought, so after Dave hung up, I called her cellphone. She answered on the second ring. After a little small talk about how we’d spent the holidays, I took a deep breath and asked, “Are you still okay with talking to your mother about Andy?”

  There was a pause on the line. I felt my heart start beating faster, and I realized how much I’d been counting on her help.

  “Yeah,” she said, finally. When she spoke, I realized I’d been holding my bre
ath.

  “Are you free next Sunday?”

  “Oh yes. I’ve got nothin’ but time these days. My doctor declared me totally disabled, and I’m on state disability, waiting for Social Security to kick in. Believe it or not, I wish I could work.”

  She was living in Sacramento, near the university hospital where she was being treated. We arranged that I would pick her up at about nine the following Sunday. Redbud was fairly far into the mountains, so I reserved a rental car with snow tires in Shasta City.

  * * *

  The morning of our trip was dark and wet, and I hoped the weather on the coast didn’t mean it was snowing in the mountains. I was out of practice driving in snow, and even a rental car with snow tires wasn’t going to cure that.

  The house where Carla was living was a tidy bungalow in a slightly seedy-looking neighborhood not far from downtown Sacramento. As soon as I pulled up, the door of the house opened, and Carla walked down the steps. She was wearing a lavender ski jacket that looked a couple of sizes too big for her and carrying a denim-blue overnight bag. There was something stooped and tired in her walk, and I got out of the car to take the bag from her and lift it into the back. She shrugged the jacket off and laid it on the back seat. “My landlady loaned it to me,” she said. Her face was thin and her skin had a pallor which showed every small line and freckle as if in relief.

  “You can recline the seat,” I said, feeling suddenly solicitous for her as she settled into the passenger seat. “Are you feeling okay?”

  She looked over at me with something that seemed more of a brightening of her face than a smile. “Yeah. I think I look worse than I feel.”

  As we drove, Carla talked a little about her life. “I was a wild kid,” she said. “I always had a chip on my shoulder. I don’t blame anybody, except maybe Mama. Everyone was good to me, my great-aunt and uncle, Dad and Charlene, but I always felt hurt because Mama never took me back with her. I used to wonder why she didn’t want me. I think I resented Emory the most; he was always kind of a little shit, but he got to live with her and I didn’t.”