Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

“I’ll do that. I’m going to Australia next month for a couple of weeks to visit my son. I’ll send you some postcards, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, the medicated flatness back in his voice. He yawned, and, catching the contagion, I did, too.

  “Sorry,” I said, “not enough coffee this morning.”

  He gave me a wan smile. “I’ll bet you’re going to have a big ol’ cup of coffee when you get out of here.”

  “Probably,” I replied.

  I told him there wasn’t anything new happening with his case, that we were still waiting for the attorney general to file their response to his habeas petition. As he always did, he nodded politely, and said, “Okay,” in a manner that made it clear he wasn’t that interested in thinking about it. After he yawned a couple more times, I suggested that perhaps he really needed to go back to his cell and get some sleep, and he agreed. He knocked on the door behind him to signal to the guards, and we waited several minutes, making awkward conversation until they came.

  “Take good care of yourself,” I said, as we heard the keys in the door, “and don’t get into trouble. I’ll buy you a hamburger and an ice-cream sandwich when you’re back in Grade A.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  48

  I stayed the night in San Francisco because I was arguing an appeal there the next morning. My client, Corey Thomas, had been convicted of killing an attendant in a gas-station robbery. Not much distinguished Mr. Thomas’s case from those of three or four men I knew on the Row except that the district attorney’s office hadn’t sought the death penalty against him, so he had been sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. The evidence against him was strong, and his trial had been pretty fair, leaving not much to write about on appeal. In short, it wasn’t a winning case, and tomorrow’s argument wasn’t likely to change Mr. Thomas’s life for the better.

  A winter storm strafed the streets with sheets of cold rain, and I stayed in my motel room, rereading briefs and cases and making notes for the argument, until hunger drove me out onto Lombard Street. I ate a lonely supper at a diner a couple of blocks away, among a scatter of other out-of-towners.

  The argument went as I’d expected—fifteen minutes expounding on an arcane issue about the felony-murder rule before a politely uninterested panel of judges—and after some shopping afterward for coffee and other essentials, I left for home. I was already sick of city traffic, and missing Charlie and my redwood trees.

  Along the coast highway, a half-hour from Corbin’s Landing, a helicopter, bright orange and white, was hovering over a spot where the road dropped off steeply into a canyon. A minute later I rounded a curve and saw a pullout crowded with a couple of police cars, a fire truck, and an ambulance. A couple of onlookers had pulled their cars onto the narrow shoulder next to the cliff on the other side of the road. I stopped my car ahead of the first of them, got out, and asked a man standing next to his car what was going on.

  “Car over the edge, apparently,” he said. “Don’t know any more than that.” The wind from the ocean was spitting cold rain into my face, and I didn’t feel like waiting around to learn more. Cars going off the cliff were common enough. Some were accidents, people driving drunk and miscalculating a turn. A surprising number were suicides; one or two people a year decided to end their lives by hurling themselves and their cars onto the rocks at the ocean’s edge.

  Before moving on I called Ed, who was dog-sitting Charlie. He was home. “Job cancelled for the day because of the weather,” he told me. I drove to his place before heading to mine. Ed’s door wasn’t locked, and as I walked into his living room Pogo half knocked me over while Charlie stood just behind him barking. Ed emerged from his kitchen, shouting at the dogs to be quiet, and I handed him my thank-you gifts, a roasted chicken and a pound of coffee.

  “You missed some excitement,” he said, “or what passes for it up here.”

  “So did you,” I said. “There’s a car off the road in the canyon north of Jenner.”

  “Ugh,” he said. “Guess we’ll read about it in the paper tomorrow.”

  “So what happened here?” I asked.

  “There was this woman over at your place this morning.”

  “Really? What was she doing there?”

  “Nothing, really. Sitting in a minivan. I went over there walking the dogs, and I saw her and asked if she was waiting for you. She said she was, so I told her you weren’t home and I didn’t know when you’d be back. When we came back a half-hour later or so, she was gone.”

  “That’s strange. No one from around here, then?”

  “Nope. Didn’t recognize her or the van.”

  “Do you think she was up to something?”

  “I doubt it. She was an older woman. Not the burglar type unless she was casing the place for her grandson.”

  I was starting not to like this. “What color was the van?” I asked.

  “Blue—a Toyota.”

  “Shit.”

  “So you know who it was?” Ed asked.

  “Yeah. I’d better get home.”

  “Want me to come with you?”

  I was feeling unnerved, and I accepted his offer. We piled into my car, with both dogs in the back, and started out.

  The house was locked, and I didn’t see any sign that anyone had tried to get in. Ed and I went inside together and walked from room to room. “Everything looks fine,” I said finally. “Can I make you some coffee for your trouble?”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll get a fire going; it’s cold in here.” He went out to get wood while I changed out of my court suit and into jeans and a sweater, started a kettle of water heating and ground coffee beans.

  As I was pouring water through the coffee filter, Ed walked into the kitchen. “Got the stove lit,” he said. “And I found this on your deck rail.” He handed me a small box, wrapped in brown paper.

  I took it from him. The wrapping was wet from the rain, but I could read my name and address, hand-printed in ballpoint pen. “Think that lady left it for you?” Ed asked.

  “Maybe.” I was turning the little box in my hand, trying to figure out what might be in it. I didn’t want to open it, but I felt stupid for being afraid. I sat at the kitchen table and carefully undid the brown paper, thinking, even as I laughed at myself for doing so, that I might want to preserve it as evidence. Under the paper was a plain white cardboard box that might have held a piece of jewelry or a figurine. I opened it. Inside, lying on a bed of white padding, was a small heap of pieces of clear blown glass.

  It took me a moment to see that they were—or had been—several small glass animal figures. It was a family of crystal cats, a mother and three kittens. They had been broken, all of them, but left in recognizable pieces—heads, little legs, tails, torsos—jumbled like a tiny, sparkling boneyard on the snowy cushion. I couldn’t stop looking at them, seeing the tiny kitten faces with their green glass dot eyes, an ear intact here, another broken there. After a long moment I pushed the box gently to one side. I felt sick and hollow. “Oh, God,” I heard myself say softly, and I leaned forward, elbows on the table, and rested my forehead in my hands.

  I heard Ed ask, “Are you okay?” And I looked up, trying to compose myself, embarrassed to have lost control.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yes. I’m fine.”

  Ed glanced at the little box and its contents. “God, she must have dropped it. Wasted a trip, I guess. Did they matter to you?”

  “No. They were hers.”

  He looked curiously at the box and at me, but let the subject drop. “You don’t look so good,” he said. “Want something to drink? Do you have some beer in the fridge?”

  Suddenly that seemed like a very good idea.

  49

  The Press Democrat that showed up in my mailbox the next day had a story on page 3 about the car that had gone off the cliff on Highway One. There had been no witnesses, but a daytripper who had stopped at the pullout had seen the tire tracks and the glint of blue meta
l below and called the police on his cellphone. When I read that the car was a blue Toyota minivan, my heart sank. The article didn’t name the registered owner because the police were holding that information while they looked for the next of kin. But the van was empty when it was found, and the police had searched the area around it for whoever had been in the car and had found no one.

  I read the paper obsessively over the next few days, hoping to find out more. There was one other article, naming Eva Hardy as the owner of the van and mentioning that the police had searched the area around the crash site again with cadaver dogs and had found nothing. Then, with something like an institutional shrug, the story disappeared from view.

  I told Jim and Dave about Evie’s visit to Corbin’s Landing, the box of broken crystal animals, and the finding of her van. “I think you were lucky you weren’t home,” Jim said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she just wanted to talk—maybe pass one last message along to Andy.”

  “Why the glass animals?” Jim asked.

  “I think that was part of the message—what she felt we did to her family.”

  Dave agreed with me about Evie’s meaning in leaving me the broken figurines. “She loved those boys,” he said, “even though she messed everything up for them.”

  “She killed for them,” I said. “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. And they loved her. And covered for her all these years. When you revealed the secret they were all sharing and drove her away, you destroyed all that. No more visits, no more little outlaw band. Funny her body wasn’t found,” he went on. “That accident seems almost too pat. Maybe I watch too much TV, but I almost wonder if she faked it, rolled the van down the cliff so she could disappear.”

  I laughed, but the thought had crossed my mind. I didn’t tell Dave or Jim that I’d been sleeping with my Browning 9mm on the floor next to my bed.

  As busy as I was, getting ready to leave for Australia, the job fell on me to see Andy, to tell him the news. He’d heard it already from his counselor at the prison, and he was taking it much better than I thought he would; in fact, he didn’t seem much moved. When I asked him if he would be okay, he said, “I think so. I knew she wasn’t coming back anyway.” He hesitated for a couple of seconds before adding, “I don’t think she’s passed away. I just don’t feel like she’s gone. I think I’d know if it really happened.” It was probably better for him that way, I thought.

  On my way home, as I passed the pullout where the van still lay a hundred feet below, I opened a window, wondering whether, through some ancient sixth sense, I might be able to feel the presence of Evie’s ghost if it were down there, but nothing brushed against me except the cold air.

  50

  Brenda Collinson, the deputy attorney general, filed a response to Andy’s habeas petition at the end of November. “I’ll say the woman’s efficient,” Corey commented when he emailed it to me. I read it through quickly, just to make sure it contained no surprises, and emailed Jim that I would be paying no more attention to it until I got back from Australia.

  The response was short—less than half as long as the petition—and dismissive. She presented no exhibits in response to ours, but contented herself with a series of snippy arguments that our petition was filed too late and we’d failed to make a case for overturning the death judgment because we didn’t provide enough new evidence or include a declaration from the late Mr. Dobson confirming or denying our claims that he had acted ineffectively in representing Andy at trial. She argued that Andy shouldn’t get a hearing on his claim that he was intellectually disabled, either, because the facts of the crime—the planned kidnappings, imprisonment, and murders, and the concealment of the bodies—“exhibited a criminal sophistication entirely inconsistent with petitioner’s claim to be mentally retarded.” She suggested that he had faked his IQ scores and that Dr. Moss was either too gullible to detect the fraud or complicit in concealing it. It was an answer typical of the attorney general’s office, and nothing we hadn’t anticipated.

  As we’d expected, too, she argued that Carla’s second declaration was a vicious fabrication by an alienated daughter; that the discovery of Len’s remains—assuming they were his—didn’t prove that he’d been killed as Carla claimed; that any value her story might have as mitigating evidence for Andy was minimal because it didn’t say anything positive about Andy himself; and that no reasonable juror would have voted against giving Andy the death penalty on the strength of it, given the gruesome crimes he had committed. Since Carla was dead and wouldn’t be able to testify at any hearing that might be held, Collinson argued, the court should disregard not just Carla’s second declaration, but her first, as well, as inadmissible hearsay. The contradiction between this and her argument that the petition couldn’t be won without a declaration from Andy’s dead trial attorney seemed to have escaped her notice.

  It would probably be years before the court made a decision, either to dismiss the petition outright or award us a hearing on Andy’s claims. Death-penalty cases lurch through the system at about the speed of glaciers. Given the strength of the evidence of Andy’s mental retardation and how little Collinson had found to say against it, I was sure that the court would order an evidentiary hearing on at least that issue. It might be a long time in the future, but I had a feeling that we had saved his life—that the evidence we had of his retardation and the untold history of his childhood and his father’s murder would not be disregarded.

  Jim would have to visit Andy and explain the attorney general’s response to him. I was too busy getting ready to leave, a painful week of anxiety and overwork at the end of which I wondered whether taking a vacation was ever worth the trouble. I didn’t begin to calm down until the shuttle bus from the long-term parking lot dropped me at the international terminal of San Francisco airport. After my passport had been accepted and my luggage checked, and I’d found the gate from which the plane was leaving, I sat for an hour, lightheaded with relief and exhaustion, in the departure area and tried with no success at all to read a magazine, before joining the shuffling queue of passengers boarding the enormous plane.

  In the life out of time of a long plane flight, I made the obligatory brief polite conversation with my seat mates that preceded a tacit agreement to ignore each other. After that I drank vodka and grapefruit juice, read idly from a travel book about Australia and a book of P.G. Wodehouse stories, ate the food the flight attendants periodically passed to us, and eventually slept. I dreamed at one point that Terry and Gavin and I were in a compartment on a train. Outside the window, I could see snowy mountains peach-tinted with alpenglow, but I couldn’t remember where we were going or why, only that we had left our old house in Berkeley and weren’t planning to go back. Terry and Gavin were talking and smiling, but I was filled with sadness and loss.

  * * *

  But then, finally, it was early morning, and the flight attendants, cheery in anticipation of landing, fed us breakfast. We watched, three hundred people, with our various thoughts and emotions, the long approach and the landing in the bright horizontal sunrise. It was six o’clock, or something like that, in Sydney, as I waited, bleary and stiff-legged, at the carousel for my suitcase and then stood in the long warm creeping line to the counters at immigration and customs, my skin prickling from clothes worn too long, my backpack heavy on my shoulders because I was too tired to think of taking it off.

  I emerged through double doors into the crowded airport, looking for Gavin among the indistinct faces of strangers, and then I spotted his dark-haired head, familiar in the crowd, and saw him wave and a tall, pretty auburn-haired young woman next to him waving also. Pushing toward each other and finally meeting, Gavin (who looked so much like Terry with his fair skin and dark hair and eyes) hugged me and took my suitcase. And threading our way through the crowds, Gavin and Rita looked back in turn to make sure I was still following, through a confusion of echoing hallways and elevators and to the little blue car parked among many others in th
e gray, dim garage. And then through the pay gate and out into the bright flashing concrete din of airport traffic, blue sky and clouds and car rental offices, freeway median landscaping, flashing glass cubes of office buildings, stands of gum trees in the middle distance, and unknown birds wheeling overhead, and cool morning air scented with jet fuel and deep-fryer fat and coffee. Stopped at a red light, Gavin looked back at me to ask how I was doing, and his smile warmed me like the spreading sunlight. For a little while I had the remnants of my little family back together, and nothing to do but be happy while it lasted. In a land across the earth, in a city I had never seen, I was home. And it was summer, glorious summer.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  After I began this book, a legal procedure used in Andy Hardy’s case, the simultaneous filing of state and federal habeas corpus petitions, changed because a court decision made it no longer necessary in California. I opted to retain the framework I started with, for a couple of reasons. First, it simplified the legal process in the case and made the timeline of the investigation more suitable to a novel. And second, procedures in capital litigation change so frequently in response to court rulings and the passage of new laws that it would be difficult to write a book involving them that wouldn’t be out of date by the time it was finished.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  L.F. Robertson is a practicing defense attorney who for the last two decades has handled only death-penalty appeals. Until recently she worked for the California Appellate Project, which oversees almost all the individual attorneys assigned to capital cases in California. She has written articles for the CACJ (California Attorneys For Criminal Justice) FORUM, as well as op-ed pieces and feature articles for the San Francisco Chronicle and other papers. Linda is the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Unsolved Mysteries, and a contributor to the forensic handbooks How to Try a Murder, and Irrefutable Evidence, and has had short stories published in the anthologies My Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years and Sherlock Holmes: The American Years. Two Lost Boys is her first novel.