“So that was Steve Scanlon,” Dot said. “I’ve never seen him before.”
“He gave me chills,” Lillian said.
“What do you think the judge thought of him?” Dot asked.
“I can’t tell,” Mike said. “I thought Scanlon did pretty well, all things considered. But,” he added with a small sigh, “I don’t think we’ve really got the judge on board with us.”
Dot nodded. “That’s what I thought, too.”
“Those two prosecutors,” Lillian said. “They were pretty rude, don’t you think?”
“It’s just courtroom tactics,” Mike said.
We exchanged good wishes for the holidays and the usual jokes about “see you next year,” and the two of them left for home. “Man,” I said to Mike, “Dot and Lillian look younger than I feel right now.”
Josh Schaeffer, as usual, had a few questions about what had just happened, which we tried to answer. His stories about the hearing had continued to be fair, and even a little sympathetic now and then, and we were feeling more comfortable talking with him than we had at first. “I’ve gotten to know Mrs. Henley pretty well, coming here,” he said. “Nice lady.”
We agreed.
“Strange for someone like her to find herself here,” he mused, with a movement of his head and eyes that took in the hallway and the courtroom door. “In the best of families, huh?”
36
At some point in middle age I stopped liking the holidays. Even before Terry died, they were a confusion of layered images, happy and sad, which my mind replayed involuntarily every year; and every year it became more difficult to show a brave and festive face to my family and the world.
The happy Christmas memories—with my mother and father and sisters, cross-country skiing in the state park on a crystalline day, white with snow; the trees we cut every year at the tree farm outside Anchorage—melt together with the last Christmas Terry and I spent with the two of them, before my father’s heart attack, and the Christmas at my sister Candace’s house after my mother’s cancer diagnosis.
Christmases with Terry and Gavin, which live in my memory as an idealized dream of trees, lights, presents, and cookies, happened on the other side of the chasm that is Terry’s suicide; on this side are seasons when, with Gavin at school halfway around the world and not coming home, I numbed myself with obsessive work during the day and eggnog spiked with rum in the evenings, and fought the urge to break down in tears whenever I saw a Christmas tree in someone’s window.
I’ve thought sometimes of taking the month and traveling someplace, if such a place exists, where no one knows about Christmas. A little like Paul Bunyan, I’d put on a Santa hat and carry a sprig of holly and a candy cane, and where someone asked me why the silly hat and striped pencil, there I’d settle until after the first of the year.
This year, I did the next best thing: I flew to Australia, where it was early summer, and went to a wedding, which made it all feel much more like June than December. It was the best possible reunion with Gavin, sunlit and busy with plans for the ceremony and the reception. I was delighted to meet Rita, his fiancée, and her family, and grateful to be there as Gavin’s clan. I cried, of course, during the service, and drank just enough at the reception; I was proud and happy and not (I hope) too maudlin when it came my turn to speak.
* * *
After the long flight back, I decked my house with colored lights to ease the pain of separation and cheer the dark days around the solstice; wrote and mailed Christmas cards to a dozen clients and former clients on the Row; baked cookies and foisted them off on Ed or traded them with Harriet for hers; and shopped with Harriet for presents and gift bags to wrap them in. Ed and I bottled our cider and tried a little; it tasted flat and sour to me, but when we took some to Vlad for a professional opinion he declared it a success and said it would be better once it had acquired some carbonation in the bottles.
Almost as soon as I arrived home, I paid another visit to Walt Klum; it was my relay in the race to keep him alive until—we hoped—he felt well enough to sign the form requesting new counsel. Walt didn’t seem much different, at least at first, but he stayed for the whole visit, ate a peppermint ice cream sandwich from the machines, and cracked a small smile when I said the company must have stocked them just for Christmas.
Inmates are allowed to receive one package each quarter of nonperishable food and personal items like shampoo and toothpaste from friends or family outside. Abby had sent Walt the largest quarterly package the prison allowed, and he was well supplied with crackers, processed cheese, beef jerky, dried soups, cookies, instant coffee, and so forth. Between that and the money we’d put on his books for supplies from the prison canteen, he didn’t have to go hungry when he became afraid of prison food. He said he felt better having that to go to. And when he told her about his fears of the guards, she had reassured him. “She says I did the right thing, telling you and her and the doctors. She says that may stop them from doing anything if they’re thinking of it. And if anything happens, you’ll all know why, and Ms. Stanhope says she’ll help me if they give me a disciplinary write-up.”
I told a couple of funny stories about Charlie and talked about my trip to Australia. He was surprised Gavin was married. “Hard to believe—he was in high school, wasn’t he, when you were working on my appeal?”
He spoke fondly of Melanie, the young investigator Abby had mentioned to me. He said she’d spent a lot of time on his case, traveling to his hometown outside Oroville and to Missouri and Oklahoma, where his mother’s and father’s parents had come from. “She learned a lot about my family. She’s a hard worker—dedicated.” I said it sounded as though she’d placed a lot of importance on building a case for saving him from the death penalty, and he nodded. I didn’t go on to say it, but I hoped it would occur to him at some point that she would be heartbroken to see her efforts wasted. As we separated outside the cage, Walt wished me a merry Christmas.
For a couple of weeks I allowed myself to forget about Howard, except for the calls I accepted from him, during which he ranted on about the hypocrisy of Christmas, the conspiracy marshaled to keep him on death row, and the lack of effort Mike and I were making to free him. But then one afternoon Mike called to tell me Dan Connelly was pretty sure he’d located Dwayne Forbush. “He’s in Indio—surprise, eh? Dan is checking flights down there.”
“Indio—home of date milkshakes.”
“I’ve heard of those—never tried one,” Mike said.
“I have. Had to go to Indio once on a case. It’s in the middle of the desert, and they grow a lot of dates. Date shakes are a thing there—too sweet, though, even for me. Wish Dan good luck for me. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
A couple of days later, Mike called. “Merry Christmas, Janny. Guess what?”
“You seem full of holiday spirit. What’s up?”
“Really good news. I just heard from Dan.”
“And?”
“He found Dwayne Forbush and got a really good interview. Forbush remembered the Henley case and was sure he never met Henley till he saw him in the jail. Said the detectives showed him a photo of Henley after he was arrested, but he’d lawyered up and wouldn’t talk to them. The DA approached his lawyer, apparently, offering him a deal if he’d testify that he sold a gun to Henley, but he turned it down, because he wasn’t willing to lie. He remembers selling a gun to Scanlon and buying it back, because it was unusual; most people bought guns and kept them. He may still have the gun. Said he stored guns he thought might be hot in a footlocker in the attic of his brother’s house. He recalls he had some idea of maybe changing out the barrel and reselling it, but he got busted before he could get around to it. He says his brother died a few years ago, but his sister-in-law still lives in the same house, as far as he knows. He figures the footlocker was still there when his brother passed away, because he would have asked Dwayne before doing anything with it.”
Mike was so excited, I could hardly get a w
ord in. “That’s amazing!” I finally managed. “Can we get to the gun, if it’s there?”
Mike calmed down a little. “Dan and I are working on that. Forbush is in a wheelchair—hurt his back working construction some years ago—and he lives with his mother. He’s willing to come to Wheaton to testify, and he has a niece living down there—actually his brother John’s daughter—who would be willing to go with him as a companion, so she can visit her mom, but he needs to find someone to take care of his mother. He can help us identify the gun, if it’s there. Dan gave him a subpoena, and I’m going to be working on getting his travel expenses covered by the court. Thank Dot for that five thousand bucks; it’s already been damned handy.”
“Merry Christmas to you, too,” I said.
“It’s merrier already,” Mike replied.
37
On Christmas Eve, Gavin and Rita made their usual holiday Skype call. It was Christmas Day and summer there, and they were planning to spend the day at the beach. Gavin told me he had decided to apply for professorships at several Australian universities.
“So you’re really settling there,” I said. I felt sad, but somehow not surprised. When I’d seen them at their wedding, Gavin had seemed very at home, and Rita’s family had been welcoming and surprisingly large. She had two brothers and a sister, and we had been surrounded by an ever-changing and cheerful crowd of parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews. I had thought at the time that Gavin seemed in his element among all his new relatives.
I was still feeling a little bereft as I made the drive to Wheaton a week and a half later. The post-holiday blues had hit me, and another visit with Walt Klum, struggling with his own loss, hadn’t done anything to raise my spirits. It was getting close to the time of year when Terry had killed himself. He had died in early February, and for several years afterward I’d felt anxious and depressed in the late winter. The feeling had subsided recently, but this year it was back.
I’d been dreaming more than usual. Once it had been a nightmare involving the case I’d worked on out of Indio, a life-without-parole murder. The crime had been particularly bizarre and gruesome: my client had stabbed and strangled his ex-girlfriend, then gouged out her eyes and cut off her breasts. Psychiatrists from both sides had testified he was mentally ill, but they couldn’t agree on a diagnosis; one had said he was schizophrenic, the other a sexual psychopath.
I had gone to see him in the prison system’s mental hospital in Vacaville, where they had taken him after he attempted suicide in prison. Strangely passive from the medications they had him on, and barely tethered to reality, he moved like a shadow and spoke to me in a faraway voice about how tired he was all the time.
In my dream, I found myself somehow in the victim’s apartment, as it appeared in the crime-scene photos—a scene of butchery, with blood on the walls and smeared and pooled on the floor and bed. The woman’s body lay in front of me, her injuries hardly visible under the enveloping, varied reds of the blood that covered her face and body. I knew my ex-client was somewhere nearby, but I didn’t know where, or how to get out of the building without being ambushed by him. In the dream I stood, paralyzed with terror, waiting for whatever was going to happen, until my fear woke me, and I sat up in bed, shivering, until morning.
The night before I left for Wheaton, I had another dream, but one I couldn’t quite remember on waking. All that was left of it was the wistful memory of a pale blue stoneware coffee mug I had bought somewhere with Terry—how many years ago? Awake, I wondered what had happened to the cup, and realized I no longer remembered. I thought perhaps it had lost its handle and served some time as a pen holder on Terry’s desk until it had been tossed in some housecleaning or during the move. The atmosphere of the dream, its sense of things lost, stayed with me through much of the drive, as a sort of floating melancholy. I felt old and tired.
Mike had asked me to come down a couple of days before the hearing, to be a witness in case we found the guns where Dwayne Forbush said he had hidden them. He had driven down the day before, to meet Forbush and his niece.
“Well, they got here fine,” he said in a call the evening before I left. “They’re staying with Karen, Dwayne’s sister-in-law. That’s where he had the footlocker—in an attic crawl space. Karen says she never goes up there, has no idea what might be in it. I’m going out tomorrow and buying a ladder and a pair of bolt cutters, so we’ll be ready when you get here.”
When I got to Wheaton, I didn’t stop at the hotel, but went directly to Karen Forbush’s house. It was a small white bungalow on a tree-shaded side street—not a new house, but well cared-for, with a Japanese maple in the front yard and a border of roses, pruned for the winter, along the driveway.
Karen Forbush’s daughter answered the door. She was a few inches taller than me, a little heavy, but pretty, with a rose-petal complexion and glossy dark-brown hair. Behind her I saw Mike with a middle-aged man in a wheelchair and a woman about the same age, who I assumed was Karen. The young woman introduced herself as Katelyn. “This is my Uncle Dwayne,” she said, gesturing toward the man as she led me inside, “and that’s my mom, Karen.” I said hello to Karen, a gentle-looking woman with faded dark hair and sad eyes, and shook hands with Dwayne, who was light-haired, with muscular arms and shoulders from navigating in a wheelchair.
Katelyn seemed excited about the purpose of our visit. I gathered she had asked Mike a lot of questions; she seemed to know a fair amount about the Henley case and what we were hoping to find. She offered to get me a cup of coffee, but I declined; I’d already had too much on the drive down.
“Well, I guess we’re all here,” Mike said, after we’d spent a few minutes making small talk about our trips. “Shall we see what’s up there?”
Mike set the ladder up in the hallway off the living room, climbed it, and slid aside the loose board that covered the opening to the crawl space, then clambered in. I followed. “Watch yourself,” he said. “There’s some plywood, but it doesn’t cover everything; the rest is only two by fours.”
I climbed clumsily over the top and sat on the plywood area. Katelyn surprised me by coming up after me. “I’m curious,” she said, standing on the ladder and taking in the dim expanse of beams and roof. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not,” Mike said. “It’s your house, after all.” I moved carefully aside to give her a spot to sit next to me.
The attic space was dark except for the daylight that filtered dimly through the soffits. Mike slowly scanned the beam of his flashlight through the gloom and stopped at a place near the end, where a couple more pieces of plywood had been set over the beams. A path of plywood pieces led from it to the piece we were sitting on. On the makeshift floor at the end we could see a few hand tools, scattered and dusty, and a small footlocker. Mike crawled over on hands and knees, and we followed.
We all kneeled and watched as Mike took the bolt cutters and cut through the stem of a padlock on the front of the footlocker. He lifted the dust-covered lid and shined his flashlight into the box. “Hah,” he said, almost involuntarily.
“Oh?” I asked.
“It’s guns,” he said, almost in a whisper. He motioned me over. “Take some pictures of this on your phone,” he said, and he held the flashlight while I took a series of photos of the contents of the box. There were five that I saw: a couple of revolvers, a smallish semiautomatic, something that might have been a Glock, and a .22 rifle with a folding stock. The box smelled musty, but everything in it appeared dry and well preserved. When I was finished, Mike closed the lid.
“Now what?” Katelyn asked.
“Now we show your uncle the photos and call the police,” Mike said. “We’re all witnesses that we haven’t touched or disturbed the contents of the box.”
Back in Karen’s living room, Dwayne Forbush studied each of the photos before pronouncing judgment. “It’s been a long time,” he said. “I’ll have a better idea when I can see the actual guns. But one of those revol
vers seems to be a Smith & Wesson .38. I used to have logs of purchases and sales—they were in code, in a notebook. But that’s long gone; the police got the notebook when they searched my apartment, and I never saw it again.”
The patrolman who arrived ten minutes after Mike’s call to the station seemed baffled about why he had been dispatched to us. After taking him up into the crawl space and showing him the footlocker and its contents, Mike tried to explain. “You see,” he said, “one of those guns may be evidence in a hearing we’re having, and I want to make sure there’s no problem with the chain of custody, so I don’t want to touch them myself. Can you get a criminalist out here to take pictures and take custody of them?”
It took a while, but eventually the patrolman was joined by a detective and a criminalist. The detective interviewed each of us and took notes; and as Mike watched from the ladder, the criminalist took photos and carefully bagged the guns. When the criminalist came back downstairs, Mike asked him to show the two revolvers to Dwayne. One, Dwayne rejected out of hand—“That’s a Taurus, I remember it had something wrong with it”—but the other he studied for a minute or two as the criminalist held it suspended on a ruler, before him. Eventually, he nodded his head and looked up. “It’s been a while,” he said, apologetically, “but it’s definitely the kind of gun I sold him. I remember he was real pleased when I said I had a Smith & Wesson, and the color of the metal and stock seem right. Beyond that, I couldn’t swear to you that it’s the gun.”
“That’s okay,” Mike said. “They’ll be testing it anyway, assuming it can still be operated.”
By the time the police were gone, and we’d closed up the crawl-space opening, everyone was tired from the excitement of the day. Karen, Katelyn, and Dwayne seemed anxious to get on with their evening. Mike went over to Dwayne and spoke quietly with him for a couple of minutes. As we were leaving, Mike asked Karen if she wanted the ladder, and she said she could probably find someone to give it to.
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