by Andrew Gross
If the boy had just been twelve, even a little larger, it would have been nothing. The current was barely more than a trickle.
But a hundred yards downstream, the river divided. There was a sliver of an island in the middle separating the two sides. No more than a couple of hundred yards long. Everyone watched with elevating concern as Kyle got himself caught in a midstream current and was drawn, against his increasing attempts to right himself, to the other side.
Dorrie became alarmed. “ Don! ”
That was when Sherwood took off his sneaks and went to jump in. But the guide held him back. They were too far along.
“He’ll be okay,” the guide said, trying to reassure him. “There’s nothing dangerous over there.” He signaled to the other raft. “We’ll meet up with him on the other side.”
Sherwood yelled out. “You’ll be okay! Just paddle, son!”
But his heart told him something entirely different.
Back outside Charlie’s apartment, Sherwood gazed out at the darkened courtyard. He turned on the radio. Something easy and soothing. Country. Annoyed at himself.
Why did he have to go through this now?
It was called a strainer-a thatch of branches just below the surface.
And the sound of that word still brought him anguish and pain, though it had been almost twenty years.
They steered the main raft to the far end of the island and waited for Kyle to make his way out.
Everyone was shouting, “ Kyle! Kyle! ” Even the other rafters.
He never did.
Sherwood finally jumped in. Panicked. Running ahead of the guide. Thrashing against the current upstream. The river was no more than thigh high and seemingly smooth, but after running hard a hundred yards Sherwood’s thighs began to tire and feel like concrete, a steady stream of water pushing against them. “ Kyle! Kyle! ” His heart suddenly accelerating in a way he had never felt on the job.
“Kyle!”
The second hundred yards lasted a lifetime. All the power in his legs simply gave way. They turned to fire and then to rubber, and he had to stop, the guide running past him.
Where are you, Kyle?
Up ahead, he saw the guide kneel in the water, freeing his boy from the brambles that had caught on his life jacket, under the surface. He gazed back with a look Sherwood would never forget, crying out, “ Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man…”
It’s time to risk it, Sherwood…
Really? He had already lost it all!
He snuggled in the car seat in a comfortable position and took out a burrito from a bag and settled in. He turned up the volume.
Thank you, the doc had said. And it made Sherwood smile.
Don’t thank me. Thank that damn pastor. Knightly.
Behind the shades in the apartment, the light had gone off.
Chapter Fifty-Four
That night, I fell asleep while paging through Greenway’s book.
I woke up a couple of hours later. The digital clock read 2:17 A.M. I climbed out of bed, poured myself a glass of water. I checked my e-mails, flicked on the TV. Criminal Minds was on.
My brain seemed to be repeating the same question over and over.
How is my brother involved?
I lay on the bed, suddenly hearing noises everywhere: a car passing by. Two late-night guests returning to their room. The low drone of the TV. I turned on the light again and picked up my book. Skimmed through a few pages at random, through the photos of the major participants, the ranch as it was back then, the police shots of the gruesome crime scene and evidence. I was hoping Greenway’s painstaking detail of the investigation would lull me back to sleep.
It didn’t take long after Riorden’s sister, Marci, was informed of her brother’s murder for attention to fall on his ex-wife, Sandy, and the “bunch of loonies” she was tied to.
Some of the threats Houvnanian had made against Riorden had found their way to the Santa Barbara police. A local gas station attendant remembered seeing “a van full of hippies” similar in appearance to Houvnanian and his group filling up at his station, only a couple of miles from the Riordens’ house earlier that day.
Houvnanian was brought in for questioning by local police. He was held on minor trespassing charges while police searched the premises. A few of his followers were brought in on misdemeanor narcotics possession, as small amounts of marijuana and hash were discovered.
While their leader was in custody, several other inhabitants of the ranch seemed eager to talk, and a picture began to emerge of the hallucinogenic frenzy that had stoked up their leader’s rage and paranoia.
My eyes began to feel heavy, but I pushed on.
Walter Zorn had handled a bunch of the early interviews with some of the ranch’s residents. I flipped ahead, ready to put the book down, as the clock neared three.
One of the people Zorn interviewed was a blond twenty-year-old runaway known as Katya. It wasn’t her real name.
Described as blond, pretty, with an affable, upbeat demeanor, it was Katya, Greenway claimed, who first gave up the names of the others who had abetted the perpetrators, among them Alex Fever and Susan Pollack, and she told the police that five others, Telford Richards, Sarah Strasser, Nolan Pierce, Carla Jean Blue, and Houvnanian “had gotten into the van early on the morning of the murders and didn’t come back until noon the next day.” She said, “It was clear to all of us something bad had happened.”
Another one who talked was Katya’s boyfriend, identified only as Chase, a nervous, long-haired musician who had dropped out of college back east.
Zorn suggested it was Chase who first led him and Joe Cooley to a marshy pond on the property where a bandana and a bloody poncho that were eventually tied to the killings were found.
And a day later, two knives with matching blood residue on them.
As the evidence tying Houvnanian, Richards, Blue, Pierce, and Strasser directly to the murder scene mounted, the identities of these early informants were withheld from the public records and their testimonies were never needed at trial.
A sudden tingling came over me.
Katya. Chase.
I sat up and read the pages over a second time, my blood picking up with adrenaline. Susan Pollack said they all had different names back then. I got up and opened the sliding door. Stepped out on the balcony. A cool breeze hit me off the ocean.
Could it be?
The breeze took my thoughts, and I pictured a man who owned a large home, who had been away on a journey for a long time. No one knew the moment when the owner might one day return.
Only the father will know…
Watch, Houvnanian had warned. I shivered.
For no one knows when the master will choose to come back. Or in what manner.
In my dream, the owner of the house was Russell Houvnanian. As I had remembered him from back then. Dark and intense and scary.
And the servant …
The servant who was waiting sent a chill down my spine.
He was my brother.
A sheen of sweat came over me. I saw it all, as if for the very first time.
Watch, Houvnanian had warned.
Chase , watch!
Chapter Fifty-Five
That morning I drove Gabby to the market to pick up a few groceries. She had asked me to dinner again that night and was making a Greek stew called stifado .
As we left, I noticed a white police car stationed along the tracks down from their apartment. I thanked Sherwood silently and felt better about leaving Charlie in the house alone.
While Gabby shopped, I got a cup of coffee and followed her around with the cart while she went to the meat department and bought inexpensive cuts on sale, and then went through produce, checking the onions for ripeness and examining the peppers for color and price.
I wanted to be alone with her, and after we went through checkout, with a small tussle over allowing me to pay, we rolled the cart over to the coffee bar and I bought a latte for her.
“Thank you f
or the coffee, Jay,” she said, “and for the groceries. This is a real treat for me.” She sipped her frothy latte with a smile. She wore a red knit shirt over a skirt, her blond hair in a ponytail. “Usually we bring our own cups here because they charge us fifty cents less.”
“I’m sorry for the way you have to live, Gabby…”
“This is our fate to bear, Jay, not yours. We are who we are. The way your brother is. You’re nice, but there’s nothing you can do.”
I shifted my stool around and looked at her. “I need you to help me, Gabby. I need you to tell Charlie to unlock the past. I need you to help me help you both.”
She smiled at me, a little fatalistically. “After Evan there is no life for us.”
“I know, but if someone conspired to kill your son, Gabby, wouldn’t you want to know? Wouldn’t you want that person brought to justice? Especially if it put the two of you in danger?”
“Danger? I’ve thought about that.” Gabby put down her cup. “Believe me, I have nothing but hate in my heart for that person if it is the case. But maybe the feeling I have most is, in the end, what does it matter? My son is dead, Jay, and if in some way Charlie was involved, with things from his past…” She looked at me. “I don’t want to lose my son and lose my husband too. That is the true danger. Can you understand that? I’ve never seen him quite like this, Jay. He’s losing his mind.”
“Gabby, whatever’s in his past is no longer buried. It’s here. It’s taken Evan, and it will take him too if you don’t help me. Get him to talk about his time on the ranch. Please . I need him to tell me what he did there. I already have some idea…”
She nodded, a little tentatively. Then she pushed a hair in place on top of her head and finished her coffee with a smile. “I will do my best, Jay. For you. Now, come on, we have to go to the bakery. Do you like sourdough bread?”
She waved good-bye to her friend behind the counter, and I wheeled the grocery cart outside through the sliding doors.
I had parked the Lincoln in an open area around the side. All the spaces around us had filled in. I got to the car and popped the trunk. Gabby went to load up the bags.
“Let me help you…,” I said, reaching for two of the heavier ones.
“No.” She laughed, her eyes blue and light. “I am old, but I am able to do this, Jay.”
“Okay, okay…” I hoisted a bulky bag containing milk and juice cartons into the trunk and went around and opened the driver’s-side door. I smelled the acrid scent of oil coming from somewhere. I looked but didn’t see anything. “I’ll take back the cart.”
I wheeled it toward the lineup of carts in the front, and a pretty Latino woman happily took it from me.
Heading back, I watched Gabby close up the trunk. Though she was probably sixty, she still looked trim and attractive. Her smile, however brief, always lit her face, and I thought to myself that this was a woman who would have really enjoyed her life if things had been different. I felt sorry for the look of anguish that had replaced her quick smile, and all the pain. She had tried hard to be a good mother to Evan, whatever the outcome. How loyal she had been to Charlie all these years.
She caught sight of me staring at her and briefly smiled.
The same moment I realized something was horribly wrong.
Walking toward her, I caught that smell again, and my gaze fixed on a slick black river of flame traveling toward us on the pavement, one car away.
No…
I ran to try to put it out, but it sped quickly under the blue Ford truck parked in the space adjacent to us, a dangerous stream of fire picking up speed.
That’s when I realized that the smell under my car wasn’t engine oil at all, but gasoline !
My eyes were now drawn to the widening black circle pooled underneath the Lincoln.
No!
I stopped, knowing I was too late, and turned back to my Lincoln in panic.
“Gabby, no…!”
She had climbed back in the car and shut the door. Still a picture of that same happy smile glancing my way.
My own gaze unraveling into horror.
I ran toward her, shouting out her name, a passerby turning, just as the stream of flame met the pool of gasoline underneath my car-suddenly engulfing it in a bright whoosh of scalding yellow heat.
“Gabby!”
I stared, helpless, as a burst of heat shot at me as if the car was an enormous gas grill overloaded with propane. Scalded, I turned away for a second, blinded. When I looked back Gabby had her arm covering her face, a twisted expression of horror on it, frantically tugging at the door, the vehicle erupting around her in flames.
“Gabby!”
I darted over, ripping off my jacket as I went for the already scalding door handle, swatting the flames away from my face.
All around me, people screamed.
The door was jammed. Gabby’s mask of helplessness and fear inside whipped the quickening drumbeat of my own exploding heart.
“I’ll get you out!” I screamed, tugging with my jacket over the fiery handle.
Goddamnit, open, please!
I pulled and pulled, but I couldn’t get my fingers around the handle. Smoke began to rise, starting to fill up the inside of the car. Gabby’s fear intensified and I realized that at any moment the whole thing might explode.
I flung down my jacket and squeezed, and finally the door mercifully released. I threw it open, grabbing on to Gabby’s arm, ripped her out of the seat, as onlookers rushed from the market, pointing and screaming all around.
I picked her up in my arms and carried her over my shoulder, twenty feet away, just as I heard this chilling, enveloping whoosh from behind me and my rented Lincoln erupted into an orange ball of flames.
“Jay! Jay! ” Gabby was screaming.
Then it blew.
The blast knocked me down, and we hit the pavement, hurled up against another parked car. Gabby clung to me, shaking, coughing smoke out of her lungs, unable to look back, guttural sobs coming out of her, from both relief and fear.
“Oh, Jay, oh, Jay, oh, Jay…”
I turned around. My car was engulfed in smoke and flame. A stomach-turning, fuel-like stench was all around. Shocked shoppers ran out of the stores, eyes stretched wide.
“It’s okay, Gabby, it’s okay.” I stroked her, my own heart slamming against the walls of my chest, as I squeezed her close. “ It’s okay…”
But no matter how many times I said it, I looked back at the smoking carcass of my car and knew it wasn’t okay.
The truth came over me. As inescapable as the wall of flames I now watched in disbelief.
This was my car.
I was supposed to be inside. If I hadn’t wheeled the cart back…
The blazing fireball, a bonfire of burning oil and smoke, melting metal and leather …
It was meant for me.
Chapter Fifty-Six
The police arrived. Two black and white sheriff’s cars and a white county vehicle, lights and sirens blaring. They pushed back the surging crowd, some of whom had helped us.
“I’m a doctor,” I said. “I’m okay.”
A minute later the EMTs came.
No matter how I stared at the melted, smoking chassis, I still couldn’t believe what had taken place.
I was okay. Just some slight burns on my fingers and a scrape on my arm from the tumble. Gabby had some first-degree burns on her face and legs. But she was completely in shock.
I muttered to one of the EMTs that I was a doctor.
They took her off to the ER in Arroyo Grande. I declined any treatment and stayed, taking the police officers through what had happened. I traced the black river of smoking fuel from beneath my own vehicle to a Dumpster around the back of the market where the fire, and whoever had set it, had originated.
Two local detectives came on the scene and took my story. The lead one was a young Latino with a shaved head. He asked if I knew anyone who might want to hurt me.
I didn’t even kno
w where to begin.
I told him I had to speak with Sherwood.
“Detective Sherwood’s with the coroner’s office in San Luis Obispo,” the detective replied. “We’re here to help you. This isn’t his terrain.”
“Find Detective Sherwood,” I said, not backing down.
It took a few minutes to locate him.
“I just heard what happened,” he said when I finally got him on the phone. “Are you all right?”
“I know what it’s all about,” I said, my blood racing, ignoring his concern.
He didn’t answer. Maybe he thought I was raving. Or a little wacky, from the shock.
“Sherwood, I know what my brother did back then. Why they want to hurt him. You can meet me at Charlie’s later. I’ll get him to talk.” I exhaled a breath, grateful Gabby and I were both alive. “We’re going to bust this wide open now, Sherwood.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
I called Kathy on the way to check out Gabby at the hospital.
I knew she would freak out over what had happened. I’d been keeping so much hidden from her: the phone warning I had received before. My visit with Russell Houvnanian.
I started by saying it was all just some random accident. My car blew up, some kind of crazy oil leak. That Gabby that been in the car, but we were all right. Just a little shaken.
That was all I could say.
“Oh, my God, Jay! ” Her first reaction was one of shock, horror. She’d clearly figured out it was bigger than what I’d made it sound. “How did it happen? I’m just so glad you’re alive!”
I felt like I was cheating on her, concealing the truth.
I didn’t know if she even believed me, but it didn’t matter. I just needed to hear her voice. “I’m okay,” I told her over and over. “I promise. I am.”
But something must have made her think I wasn’t being entirely truthful. Maybe my shakiness.
“You say Gabby was in the car?” she asked after a protracted pause.
“She’s going to be okay too. Look, everything’s finally all out in the open now anyway. I’ll be back soon.”