Janet Moodie--Next of Kin

by L. F. Robertson

  Harriet came back to check on her house, which was in an area the fire had somehow skipped. Even the trees around it were still green. I helped her pack up some things to take back to Reno, and we ate lunch at Vlad’s.

  “Bill and I decided we won’t be moving back here,” she said. “With his health problems, it’s just not safe for us to live so far from town. We’ve decided to stay in Reno, near his son, buy or rent a nice condo somewhere. Put this place on the market, or maybe rent it until prices come back up.”

  “What about your gardening?” I asked.

  She sighed. “Well, I’m getting awfully arthritic; it’s hard to do all that these days. Maybe I’ll grow some tomatoes and greens in containers on my deck. Dan—Bill’s son—said he could make me a raised bed or two in their yard.” She said this with determined cheerfulness. I admired again her resolve in the face of loss and change.

  I rented a trailer, hitched it to the back of my Subaru, drove it up the winding highway to the house, and loaded into it all I was taking with me; there was room enough still for the boxes of legal files I had stored in Santa Rosa. The day before I left, the wind shifted, and cold, damp air, carrying the smell of the ocean, drifted over the hills. Clouds, white and gray, sailed slowly across a sky the delicate blue of a Watteau painting. The next morning, as I drank a last cup of coffee and watched out my living-room window, gray clouds covered the blue, and the sky seemed to sigh and, like a mother who hears her baby cry, let down a gentle flow of rain onto the ash-covered ground.

  27

  My new home was a square, charmless bungalow in a quiet little town called Holly Beach. The house had a compact kitchen and breakfast nook, a tiny living room, and two small bedrooms. On the plus side, it had a Meyer lemon tree in the front yard, and a mandarin orange, a fig, and some kind of plum tree in the back; and if I walked out to the sidewalk, a blue expanse of ocean beyond the end of the street.

  I bought a bed frame, box spring, and mattress, and put them in the darker bedroom in the back of the house. I set up my office in the front bedroom, which had a window with a view of the lemon tree and the street beyond it, and another facing the driveway and the side of the house next door. I missed my wood stove on foggy mornings, but unlike Corbin’s Landing, the weather here never seemed to get really cold.

  Living in Holly Beach didn’t require nearly as much planning as life in Corbin’s Landing—in fact, it was hardly any work at all. It was five minutes’ drive to the main street, which had thrift stores, coffee houses, restaurants, an ice cream shop, a pharmacy, a hardware store, an antique movie theater, and a small supermarket. A shopping mall, with a much bigger market and a Trader Joe’s, was in the next town, ten minutes away. It was civilization on a small scale, but welcome just the same.

  Slowly, I began to get to know my neighbors. The house on one side was a vacation home. During the week and on some weekends it was silent. Lights came on and went off on timers, and a pair of landscapers came now and then to rake the paths, trim the tidy hedges, and pull any weeds that came up in the wood chips of the low-maintenance front yard. When the owners showed up, they kept to themselves. Sometimes I’d know they were at the house only because their car, a white Lexus SUV, would be parked in the driveway. I glimpsed them only occasionally, a slender, gray-haired man and an equally slender woman with a perfect haircut and blond highlights. They always came alone, just the two of them, and spent most of the time indoors or gone in their car, though occasionally they took walks in the neighborhood. On the rare occasions when we met outdoors, they avoided engaging with me unless we actually happened to make eye contact; then they would nod and say hello with a perfunctory half-smile and move on.

  My neighbors on the other side were more welcoming. Jackie, an ample woman who dressed in long skirts and big sweaters and still wore her gray hair long, was an artist who made watercolor paintings, cards, and jewelry. Her husband Roger, gray-bearded and as comfortably built as she was, was a retired math teacher and train buff. When they weren’t on the road at fairs and art shows or steam train excursions, they lived quietly in a cottage not unlike mine, filled with well-worn furniture, art of various sorts, houseplants, and books. They had a dog, a phlegmatic Rottweiler mix named Rhonda, who quickly made friends with Charlie and Lizzie. They also had a vegetable garden, which I could see over the fence between our yards: a pair of raised beds in which they seemed to be growing chard, kale, a tangle of cherry tomato plants, still with fruit even in late fall, and a rank collection of weeds. The rest of the yard was a wonderfully random scatter of bushes, vines, flowering plants, statuary and other odd ornaments, like pinwheels and a life-sized ceramic duck. Like me, they had a fig tree and a Meyer lemon, both of which hugged their back fence, and a huge angel’s trumpet vine that cascaded giant pale yellow flowers down its length, into their yard and mine.

  The holidays came, and I bought some strings of lights and an artificial tree—I’d left the others in my garage up north, for Ed to use or get rid of as he pleased. I’d brought some ornaments with me in a box that still smelled like smoke, but as I opened it and began hanging them on the tree, I started to feel strongly that sense of emotional free-fall that had haunted me after Terry’s death. The bulbs, blown glass fruit, flowers, and Santas, carved wood animals, each held its tiny flash of memory of other Christmases—of Gavin as a kid, Terry as a young man, my parents visiting, Christmas baking and dinners and presents. They filled me with homesickness, finally, for the time when I’d had a real home and a family, somewhere beyond the unbridgeable chasm created by time and death. I supposed someone, not me, could have put them away, closed the box and put it on a shelf. But I couldn’t; it would have felt like abandoning them and their silent, beseeching messages. So I hung them on the tree, and then went to the mall and bought a bunch of new ones to mix with them, to remind myself that the present matters, and time can also make things new.

  On the holiday I was alone. I put together for myself a fabulous breakfast of eggnog, croissants, Brie, fruitcake, and chocolates. In the afternoon, I drove to the nearest town with a multiplex open on the holiday and saw an animated comedy, in the midst of a restless audience of candy-fueled children and their parents.

  That night I dreamed about Terry. He looked like he had not long before he killed himself, his dark hair starting to gray, a few lines softening his thin, handsome face. We were in a park somewhere, and he was walking with Pepper, a black lab from another time entirely, whom we’d acquired soon after buying our house. In the way of dreams, everything was in soft focus, and after a bit of mild surprise at running into one another, we walked together and talked—about what, I didn’t remember on waking. But for some reason the dream left me feeling warmer and more comfortable, and it colored the next day with a sort of gentle serenity, as if something had been resolved, a circle closed.

  The weeks after my move had been quiet—a respite that gave me time to get settled. The courts had cut me enough slack on my various appeals because of the fire and my move that I had some space to get my caseload under control again. The water and smoke damage to my old house in Corbin’s Landing had turned out to be relatively minor, and Ed was handling the repairs while I dealt with the insurance company.

  The holidays over, I made what felt like a long-deferred visit to San Quentin, to touch base with Arturo. San Quentin is a lot farther from Holly Beach than from Corbin’s Landing, and a trip there meant I had to stay overnight. I paid Jackie and Roger, who could use the money, to dog and cat sit while I was away and offered to do the same for Rhonda, at no charge, if they had to leave her when they traveled.

  I made the drive to San Francisco one drizzly afternoon. The prison outside Soledad where we’d visited Steve Eason was on the way, visible from the highway. I wondered idly what he was doing as I drove by, thinking of how our utterly separate lives had intersected that one afternoon. In the city, I stayed the night in a noisy motel, in a room that smelled like stale tobacco and seemed to be decorated in not
hing but various shades of brown, then drove to San Quentin the next morning across the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Arturo thanked me for helping his family find an immigration lawyer, but told me his father had been deported anyway, because of an old drunk-driving conviction. His mother was back at work, but afraid of losing her job sewing clothes in a sweatshop, and his little brother had been arrested and charged with assault. On the bright side, his sister had been able to stay in college and would be graduating this year. “So she can take care of my mother if she has to without having to leave school,” he said. Arturo himself seemed to have grown up. I commented on the fact that it had been a long time since he’d been sent to administrative segregation for some bit of defiance or bad behavior. “I decided to chill,” he explained. “Lady guard on my tier said to me a while ago, ‘Arturo, why you so hardheaded? You know you always gonna lose. Guards here, we have to do our jobs whether you like it or not. Why not just program, get along with people? You’re gonna be here a long time; no point in making your life harder than it needs to be.’ And you know, I thought to myself, she has a point. I just keep getting mad, messing up, and it’s not doing me any good. So now I try to see things differently, let people do what they gonna do, and not take it personal, you know?”

  I figured it was as good a philosophy as any.

  * * *

  A couple of days after I got back to Holly Beach, Carey called. “I have a favor to ask you,” she said. “We’re close to getting a dismissal in Sunny’s case.”

  I started to congratulate her, but she said, “Not quite yet. The DA, Mike Beatty, is still gun-shy about bad publicity. It would help seal the deal if we can tell him and the judge the Ferrantes are okay with it. Beatty says the family has been approached about a deal, but he was kind of cagey about what they said. It may be that they haven’t given him a clear answer. I’d like to see them again and sound them out. Would you come with me?”

  Harrison was actually a lot closer to Holly Beach than it was to Corbin’s Landing; I could be there in less than half a day. “No problem,” I said. “Just say when.”

  28

  This time we met the Ferrantes at the big house on the hillside where Robert III now lived. We sat on chairs and sofas around a coffee table at one end of the living room, a lodge-like space with cathedral ceilings and a wall of windows framing a panorama of the valley and the highway running through it. On this winter day, the view had the pastel colors of an impressionist painting. At the end of the room where we were seated, a fire burned cheerfully in a big stone fireplace. Robert III—the one the family called Rob—and Marta, his wife, had brought us cups of tea and coffee and a plate of soft, spicy cookies drizzled with caramel-colored icing. “Marta’s persimmon cookies,” Rob said, with obvious pride.

  “Marlene’s recipe, actually,” Marta said. “It’s kind of a classic around here; they print it in the Harrison paper every persimmon season.” I took one and bit into it. The soft cookie, redolent of cinnamon and ginger and not too sweet, made a perfect combination with the brown sugar flavor of the icing. I resolved to look it up.

  It was a substantial group of family members who met us: Robert, Jr.—Bob—and his wife Marlene, Tony and Cindy, John and Barbara, as well as Rob and Marta. Rob was in his fifties, lean and dark like his father. After the initial small talk, he asked the first question. “I wasn’t here when you met with everyone else last time. What is it you’re looking for?”

  I’d had a meeting like this with a victim’s family once before, years ago, after a client of mine won a reversal of his death sentence. Our goal in that case had been to convince the family members not to object to resentencing our client to life in prison without possibility of parole, rather than have another trial on the issue of whether he should be sentenced to death again. What we were asking of the Ferrantes was a much bigger concession: to agree to let Sunny, who had been convicted once of murdering their brother, their uncle, walk free, with all the charges against her dropped.

  Before going on, I thought I’d try to find out what the prosecutor had told them. “Things have changed a lot since we were here before,” I began. “I understand the district attorney, Mr. Beatty, may have talked with you about what happened.”

  “Actually,” Bob broke in, “it was the head honcho, Jim Chalmers. He kind of told us where things stand. We’ve all talked about it and what we might want to do. He says the case is going to be hard to retry. He still thinks Sunny’s guilty, but he told us the same thing you said, that their star witness, the guy who said Todd told him Sunny hired him—signed a sworn declaration saying he lied about it all. Chalmers said the guy is kind of backtracking now, but he says he’s not worth much as a witness anymore, and their case against Sunny is a lot weaker without him. And now, he says, they have two people saying Sunny didn’t have anything to do with it. Brittany says Braden got Todd to do the murder, and Braden says it was Brittany.”

  Chalmers’ assessment was almost exactly in line with what I’d told Carol Schiavone. I breathed an inward sigh of relief.

  “Brittany might just be saying that to help her mother,” Rob said.

  “Frankly, my money’s on Braden,” Tony said.

  A couple of the others murmured their agreement.

  “Braden’s a conniver,” John said. “I wouldn’t have thought he’d have his father killed, though. But then he supposedly hired someone to kill his business partner, so go figure.”

  “Yeah, but he’s accusing Brittany,” Marlene said.

  “Brittany? I don’t see that,” Barbara said. “She was just an ordinary teenager, as far as I could see.”

  “But she couldn’t stand Greg,” Cindy said. “I saw it whenever they were here together. She stayed away from him. Never talked to him if she didn’t have to. Always referred to him as Greg, never Dad. And she’d just look daggers at him when he made some snide comment to Sunny.”

  “That’s a long way from talking your boyfriend into murdering him,” Marlene said.

  “She wouldn’t be the first,” said Barbara. “A girl in my high school got together with her boyfriend and killed her stepfather. Turned out he’d been sexually molesting her. They sent her to juvenile hall.”

  “And there was that case here, six or seven years ago,” Cindy added. “It was in Beanhollow, but still—”

  “We’ll probably never know,” Bob said. “Let’s get back to the business at hand. Near as I can tell, Chalmers wants to know how we’d all feel if they dropped the charges against Sunny.”

  Several people nodded.

  “And my guess is, you’d like the same thing.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, we’ve talked about it a lot in the family over the past few weeks,” Robert said. “And at this point I believe we all pretty much agree. Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said to the rest of the gathered relatives. “My mother—Tony’s and mine—made it a mission of hers to get justice for Greg, as she said. Once the DA back then convinced her that Sunny was guilty, she was all in. She wanted Sunny convicted, and she wanted her dead, for killing her boy. We respected that—well, some of us did, some didn’t agree, and it divided the family badly for a while. But she’s passed on now, and the rest of us aren’t as intent on avenging Greg as she was. And besides, with this new information, we’re looking at the possibility that Sunny may actually be innocent.”

  Several murmurs of “Yes,” and “Right,” came from the group.

  “Even Mama wouldn’t have wanted her to be punished for a crime she didn’t commit. Nobody’s happy that it looks like either Braden or Brittany is responsible for the murder, and from what Chalmers said, it doesn’t seem that either of them is going to be charged. But we’re also thinking that we don’t want to go through another family fight and another trial, with all the publicity. I guess this is kind of a roundabout way to reach the bottom line, but I believe we’re all in agreement to let the DA drop the charges and all get on with our lives.”

 
Again, several people around the table nodded or murmured their assent.

  “Thank you,” Carey and I said, with real feeling.

  “So you can tell Chalmers or Beatty that on our behalf. And I’ll confirm it if they want to know,” Bob said.

  We thanked everyone again. “We really believe Sunny is innocent,” I said. “You’ve done a great thing for her.”

  I must have looked as if I was about to cry, because Cindy leaned toward me and said, “That’s okay, honey. Would you like some more coffee? And have another cookie.” She held up the plate, and I took one, and so did she. “I feel like we’re all going to be better for this,” she said.

  And thus, the Ferrantes removed one of the last obstacles to allowing the case against Sunny to go away.

  If this were a thriller, I thought, there would have been a point at which the hero found himself confronting someone willing to kill him to prevent him from revealing the truth. Sunny’s case was almost the opposite. A lot of people, it seemed, suspected that an injustice had been done and hoped that the truth would somehow come to light. Sunny, of course, knew the truth, or part of it, but she had been afraid to raise the lid on the Pandora’s box which held it; and Craig Newhouse had felt bound to inaction by her fear. The Ferrantes, for their part, had remained passive and kept their thoughts to themselves, to keep peace in their own family.