Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  “Why did you do that?”

  Andy looked down at the table. “I was scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “I was thinking Emory was trying to give her some kind of poison.”

  I remembered what Nicole had said about the truck headlights. “Did anyone go looking for her after you came back?”

  “Em did. I think he heard us leave in the truck, ’cause he was waiting at the door when I got back. He asked me where I’d been. I didn’t want to tell him, but I guess he figured it out, ’cause he went out to the barn and looked and then jumped into the truck and left. When he came back, that’s when he told me we were dead men and it was all my fault. And then we packed up and left.”

  “Did you know at the time what had happened to the other girls?”

  “No. Just what I told you, that Em said he drove them someplace and dropped them off.”

  “But Evie knew about the others,” I said.

  Andy was silent, frowning, for a long moment. “Yeah, I guess she did,” he said, finally. “That’s why she was so mad.”

  He looked at me, pleading. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t unless you give me permission.”

  “I don’t want you to tell anyone.” He shivered. “I shouldn’t have said it.” He closed his eyes and rocked back and forth, his head bent forward, his hands clasping each other in his lap.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  The rocking stopped, and he looked up at me. “Yeah,” he said, without conviction. “Just scared.” His eyes found the candy bar on the table. “I never ate that,” he said, and he reached for it and offered it to me. “I don’t feel hungry any more. Do you want it?”

  “I can’t take it away from here,” I said. “Prison rules.”

  “Okay. Shame to waste it.” He opened the wrapper and broke a piece off the bar from one end. “Would you like some?” he asked.

  “I got it for you.”

  “I’m not that hungry. Please?” He held out the piece of chocolate bar, and I took it from him and took a small bite, tasting cheap milk chocolate and sweet caramel. Food was about the last thing I wanted just then, and the candy felt like cardboard in my mouth.

  43

  When I got home, there was a voicemail from Dave on my answering machine. I called him right away.

  “I have news,” I said, “but what did you call about?”

  “You won’t believe this,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Remember Steve Bardelli, up in Washington?”

  It took me a moment. “Was he the guy looking for Len’s remains?”

  “That’s him. Well, he may have found them.”

  “That fast?”

  “Looks like,” Dave said. “He rang around police departments and coroner’s offices in the areas where we figured Evie and Emory might have gone to, asking about unidentified remains. Said he was working for relatives of the disappeared man. There weren’t that many places to call, and one of them phoned back with what seemed like a possible hit. So he had them fax their report. And damned if some loggers didn’t find some bones and the remains of a sleeping bag in a little mountain valley about ten years ago.”

  “Damn!”

  “Apparently they’re in a storeroom in the morgue. Not much left, it seems. No skull, for example. I guess animals carry bones away and scatter them.”

  “So now what?”

  “I am so glad you asked that question,” Dave said, with exaggerated pride. “As it happens, Brad and I worked on a case not long ago where we had to arrange for post-conviction DNA testing. I have an expert you can talk to.”

  “Let Jim do it,” I said.

  “Okay, Jim. And I know a good lab. So we just have to get the coroner to release the bones, or enough of them to test.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard,” I said. “We’ll be asking on behalf of Len’s sister and brother, not Andy. Now let me tell you my news.” And I told him Andy’s story of the night he released Nicole.

  “Shit,” Dave said.

  “And there’s nothing we can do with it,” I said. “Even if Andy were willing to talk about it, who’d believe him?”

  44

  Judge Fuentes wasn’t nearly as impressed as we were with the possibility that we’d found Len’s body. “So it supports—maybe—his late sister’s declaration that his mother killed his father,” she said in the telephone hearing she had set so that we could explain our request for money for the DNA testing. “The declaration is still hearsay, and what is the relevance of it, if no one else, including your client, confirms it?” In the end, though, she agreed that Carla’s declaration was not entirely without value and that the evidence that Andy had witnessed his father’s murder might have been seen as mitigating by a jury, had Dobson managed to find it. “Given this family’s reluctance to come forward,” she warned, “I don’t see how you’re going to show that trial counsel was ineffective for not unearthing this.” In the end, though, she approved the money, possibly because she was curious, too, whether the bones in the morgue were really Len’s.

  Dave and Brad arranged to get the necessary samples to the lab Dave had mentioned. Dave called Len’s sister Gladys Clancy with the news that they might have found Leonard’s body and sent saliva sample kits, one each for her and her brother Walt. Because of the age of the bones and the fact that we had no known sample from Leonard, the lab could do only mitochondrial DNA testing. The DNA profile wouldn’t be unique to the owner of the remains, but would be one he shared with his mother and all his maternal relatives. Even so, if the mitochondrial DNA in the bones was a match with that of Gladys and Walt, it would be strong evidence that the bones were Len’s.

  45

  The phone rang on a Friday night as I was watching a Hercule Poirot TV movie and wishing my own cases would resolve themself as tidily as Agatha Christie mysteries.

  “Mom?”

  I was startled by Gavin’s voice on the phone. “Gavin, what is it? Is everything okay?”

  He laughed, that grown-man’s laugh that always surprised me a little, a stranger’s baritone evolved from the piping voice of my little boy. “I guess I should call more often.”

  “No, no, it’s okay. I understand the time difference and all. And we email each other a lot. I guess—a phone call seems so—fraught or something.”

  I was chatting a little crazily, overcome with surprise and with missing him.

  “Well,” he said, “I called because I have big news. Two things, in fact. I’ve been offered a job—a professorship—at the University of Idaho, starting in January. And—” a dramatic pause—“Rita and I are getting married.”

  “Oh my God,” I burbled. “Oh, sweetie, I’m so happy for you. Have you set a date yet?”

  “The second Saturday in December—I think it’s the twelfth.”

  I heard a woman’s voice say, “No, it’s the tenth,” and something else.

  “Rita’s saying it would be just like me to get you here two days after the wedding.”

  “You’re getting married over there?” Saying that, I felt stupid, and I backtracked. “I guess it doesn’t matter whether it’s there or here, really.”

  “Not to us, so much. But we’re doing it for Rita’s family. They’re going to be losing her when she leaves with me, so we figured we’d have it here, as the big send-off. Which brings me to my next point. You’re invited, of course. And we want you to come and see Australia while we’re still here to show you around.”

  I hadn’t done any traveling for pleasure since Terry died, except to Alaska. I felt uncomfortable going places alone and reluctant to share a tour with a bunch of strangers. And, though it pained me to admit it, I seemed to have lost the joyous resilience I’d had when I was younger. I felt fragile and brittle, as if instead of bouncing back from the little surprises and irritations of travel, I might chip or break like a dried weed stem or a bit of old bone.

  Over t
he phone, Gavin reacted to my hesitation. “Here,” he said. “Let me put Rita on.”

  A second later, a young woman’s voice said, “Hello—Mrs. Moodie?” The “hello” sounded wonderfully Australian, and I liked Rita’s voice immediately.

  “Please,” I said, “call me Janet.”

  “Okay—Janet, then. I’m looking forward so much to meeting you. Gavin and I have been working out travel plans for while you’re here. We thought we might go to Melbourne and maybe over to Tasmania.”

  I was a bit overcome. “I don’t know much about Australia,” was all I could think of to say.

  “Gavin thought you’d like seeing the ruins of the old prison at Port Arthur. Professional interest and all. You will come, won’t you? My mum and dad would love to meet you, and the wedding won’t be complete without you.” I heard Gavin say something in the background, and Rita laughing. “He says he needs you there to give him away,” she said to me. “Here, I’ll give the phone back to him.”

  “You’re planning to take me on a trip right after your wedding?” I asked Gavin. “What about a honeymoon?”

  “We didn’t think we needed the usual honeymoon. We’ve been living together for almost a year. We both decided it would be more fun to make it a vacation, and while you’re here you really should get to see a little of the country. Rita loves showing visitors around.”

  I felt myself getting tearful. “Oh, honey, thank you,” was all I could say.

  “So,” he said, “you’re coming here, right?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  We talked some more about his new job and the move, travel dates and so forth, until he and Rita had to leave to meet some friends for lunch. “We’ll be in touch about arrangements,” he said before signing off. “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too,” I said. “I’m so happy for you.” After hanging up the phone, I stood still for a long time and listened to the empty silence left by the absence of his voice.

  “Buy the ticket,” Ed said, when I told him about Gavin’s phone call.

  “Good heavens! Go!” Harriet and Bill said, almost in unison.

  Dave emailed me every day, with one word, “So?” until I’d gone onto the Qantas website and made my reservation.

  46

  October seemed to end a week after it began, and there was hardly enough time to prepare for the trip. I rushed to get briefs in my other cases written and invoices sent to various courts before I left, and dealt with what amounted to harvest season, even in my young and slapdash garden, picking apples and pears from the trees I’d planted four years ago, making jam, drying apples, freezing applesauce and cooked pears. In my spare time, I shopped for wedding gifts for Gavin and Rita and Christmas presents for Rita’s family, and for a dress and jacket for the wedding. I’d half forgotten about the DNA testing when Corey’s email came. “Jim wants you to see this,” he wrote, attaching the lab report.

  I opened the attachment and read it. The report described the samples, the testing that had been done on them, and the results. The mitochondrial DNA sequenced from the bones matched that of Gladys Clancy and Walt Hardy. Bingo, I thought—and then, Now what?

  47

  I had my answer soon enough. On a drizzly November morning, as I was cleaning up the table of authorities on a reply brief that had to be mailed that day, the phone rang. Muttering an unprintable word or two, I picked it up and was startled to hear Jim on the line.

  “Janet, hi,” Jim said. From the tone of his voice, it was clear something had happened, and it wasn’t good.

  “Jim—what’s up?” I said.

  “It’s Andy. He’s in the prison hospital.”

  “Oh dear—what for?”

  “They’re saying it was a suicide attempt.”

  “What? You’re kidding.” Andy was about the last person I could think of who might try to kill himself. “What happened?”

  “Apparently he got hold of a lot of pills.”

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “They think so. He’s still pretty sick, though. Do you have any idea why he would try to kill himself? He calls you a lot, doesn’t he? Did he say anything about feeling depressed?”

  “No,” I said, “but now that you mention it, I haven’t heard from him in a couple of weeks. Does Evie have any idea why he did it?”

  “That’s even stranger,” Jim said. “She seems to have disappeared. Her phone is disconnected. I had Corey call the nursing home, and they told him she just suddenly said she was retiring and left with only a few days’ notice. The supervisor there didn’t know where she was; she said all Evie said was that she planned to do some traveling for a while.”

  “Do you have any idea what happened? Did she learn about the DNA testing, do you think?”

  “She may have. We sent Andy a copy of the brief we filed with the court about the report.”

  “That’s probably it,” I said. “Andy told her, and she’s gone on the run.” No wonder Andy had tried to kill himself. I wondered what would happen to him now. I asked how Jim had found out about Andy.

  “A neighbor of his in the prison called his own lawyer, and she phoned me.”

  “I should go see him,” I said, and regretted it instantly. I had too much to do, and there was no reason why Jim couldn’t get his ass up to San Francisco to see his client.

  “That would be great,” he said.

  So I dragged myself out of bed on one more dark fall morning, put on my prison-visiting uniform, and made the long drive.

  “Mr. Hardy’s Grade B,” the guard in the gatehouse said, as she stamped my visitor form.

  Oh, great, I thought. Grade B meant that Andy was in the “hole,” probably as punishment for having the pills on which he’d overdosed. Inmates in Grade B were not allowed contact visits, even with their attorneys. Instead of Plexiglas cages, we were given booths the size of closets, where we had to talk over a telephone to our clients, with a heavy glass window between us. It isn’t an arrangement that encourages free conversation.

  On the drizzly walk to the visiting building, I was too cranky to pay much attention to whatever view of the bay might be visible behind the curtain of fog and rain. Morosely, I gave my ID to the guard in the window and went to wait for Andy in one of the booths.

  After a while the door into the room on Andy’s side of the window opened, and he emerged, unshaven, pale and bewildered. A guard, half-visible behind him, unlocked his handcuffs, and Andy sat. He picked up his phone, looking dully at me through the glass, and I put the receiver on my side to my ear.

  “Hi, Andy,” I said.

  “Hello,” he answered, his voice trailing off as if he wasn’t sure where the conversation would go from there. He looked his age, for once. The skin on his face was yellowish and flaccid-looking, and lines were visible on his forehead and around his eyes.

  “I see you got rolled up,” I said. “Was it because of the pills?”

  “Yeah.” His voice over the phone sounded tired and expressionless. “I didn’t fight the disciplinary. I think I’ll only get ninety days in the hole, though.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “Better.”

  His one-word answers and the tired flatness of his voice nonplussed me. “Are you on medication now?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Something to make me feel less depressed. Mostly it makes me want to sleep.” He squinted for a few seconds, as if trying to think of something. “I can’t remember what it’s called,” he said, finally.

  “So what happened to you? I was really shocked when Jim called and said you were in the hospital.”

  A slight grimace, like a shadow of pain, crossed Andy’s face. “Mama’s gone,” he said.

  “I heard that,” I said. “We tried to call her when we heard about you. Do you know where she went?”

  “No.”

  Andy stared blankly at the sill of the window and swayed a little back and forth.
r />   “What happened? Do you know?”

  “She wrote me a letter. She said she had to do it because of me and Carla—because Carla wrote that deposition and because I told you about that night.”

  “What night?”

  “The night I let the girl go. She said she couldn’t stay around here any more because the police might come after her. She told me I let her down.” He stopped speaking for a moment, as if he was trying to find the energy or strength to continue.

  “Let her down? How?” I asked.

  “She said…” His eyes were wet, and a couple of tears rolled onto his cheekbones. “She said she sacrificed everything for me and Emory, and Carla and I went and accused her of terrible things. She said, ‘You don’t know anything.’ And she said she was going away, and I’d never see her again.” Andy shuddered, wiped his arm across his face, and drew a deep breath, then looked up at me, bewildered. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said.

  With the glass window between us, I felt helpless to reassure him. “We’ll be there for you. We’ll try to help you,” was all I could think to say.

  “Do you really think she isn’t coming back?” Andy asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “She’s scared right now, but she loves you and Emory. She may change her mind after a while, when she realizes nothing is going to happen to her.” Even as I said it, I knew I was lying. Evie’s devotion had probably been all about keeping her family quiet about their shared secrets.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I hope so.”

  “I’m glad you came down to see me,” I said. “I was really worried about you.”

  “I’m feeling a little better,” he said. “I don’t like being here, though. I can’t have my TV, so there isn’t much to do. And I can’t make any phone calls until I’m back on Grade A, either.”

  “You want me to come again in a couple of weeks and see how you’re doing?”

  “Okay.”