Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  Bobby was in the book, too. He was nineteen and a senior, photographed in a sport jacket, smiling shyly, next to a plaque on the wall. He had earned one of the top five scores in the nation in the Putnam Mathematical Competition. That was something everyone in our family knew.

  Nowhere in the yearbook was it mentioned that for the first time students had to pay tuition that year to attend the University of California.

  “It’s just a small fee,” I remembered Sara saying to our father.

  “No,” he’d said. “It’s the beginning of the end of everything we worked for.”

  My father had his timing wrong. The beginning of the end of everything he’d worked for had come earlier, on the summer night he cut his only son down from the ceiling.

  *

  WHEN ERIC and the girls came home on Sunday, they were so happy to see me I would have bargained away everything to stay like that always. It was late before Eric and I had a chance to talk. I knew it was dangerous. There was the possibility of a fight that could last all night when I needed my wits about me on Monday. I might not be able to hang on to my fragile decision.

  “I don’t want a drink,” I said when he offered me one. My husband looked surprised. This was something new.

  I explained the situation as simply as I could. Here is what this person, that person, and these people wanted from me. This was what I was going to do: I would be in court for my brother on Monday morning.

  I steeled myself for Eric’s anger. But he sidestepped what I’d just said. He spoke to me as a lawyer, his voice matter-of-fact, his feelings hidden.

  “Bobby seems to be in control of himself in a way I didn’t foresee,” Eric said. “He got his opening statement right. He understands that he has to offer a defense. If he’d tried to take credit for his bombings or claim they were justified, he’d be admitting guilt and the judge would have stopped the trial.”

  I said I understood that.

  “But he’s going to get his philosophy in at some point, and for that to have any sort of credibility, he needs two things.” Eric held his fingers up to tick them off. “One, he needs to appear somewhat sympathetic as a human being. And two, he has to seem sane. If he’s evil, then so is his philosophy. If he’s crazy, same thing.”

  I’d already heard this from Debra. A fight with Eric would have been less painful.

  “To do those two things, he needs you,” he continued. “He needs you to humanize him, to make him seem reasonably sane.” He paused to make sure I got the point. “He’s using you, Natalie.”

  “I know that,” I said, because I did. I looked toward our large living room window, the pane streaked with rain. The news crews would be back in the morning and the curtains once again drawn. “Bobby can’t endure the humiliation of being depicted as crazy in that courtroom. One way or another it would kill him.” My voice broke and I waited to regain it. “If I did what the defense and everyone else wants, I would be the one doing that to him.”

  Eric was thoughtful for a moment. “I understand,” he said. “But, if you give Bobby what he needs, you risk hurting yourself. It might be brave, but it’s also foolhardy. You’re going to make people angry, including Sara and your mother. Some of them might go after you publicly. They’ll question your motives, even your sanity.”

  “I know,” I said quietly.

  We sat together without speaking, listening to the rain, and then I said good night. I had to be up at five the next morning. A few hours after that, I would have to walk into a courtroom and sell out my mother, my sister, and the attorneys who were trying to save my brother’s life.

  chapter forty-eight

  MY HANDS CLENCHED, I gazed at the judge’s bench and the flag behind it, as one might an altar, a cross. But no prayers would be answered for me. Debra looked stricken when she saw me in my usual seat, her eyes pained and disbelieving. I looked away from her. There was no point in trying to explain. I rose to let my sister and mother sit, neither of them guessing what it meant for me to be here in my spot. I clung to the aisle seat, as if I imagined I could run.

  The prosecution lawyers came down the aisle, their steps light, every shred of evidence on their side. Bobby brushed past me in his borrowed jacket, his head down, his narrow shoulders hunched, his legal pads clutched to his chest. The mismatch would have been heartbreaking if Bobby had not done all he was accused of. My brother did not look at me. He had so trusted I would be here that he hadn’t even thought to subpoena me.

  There was silence tinged with dread as we stood for the judge, and saw the jury enter. This was it, my brother’s big moment.

  As if we didn’t know, the judge explained that it was my brother’s turn to put on his defense. Bobby rose and in a thin, nervous voice called his first witness. It wasn’t me.

  A quietly dressed, slightly built woman came forward, her curly hair streaked with gray. She put her hand on the Bible and stepped into the witness stand.

  Bobby stood behind the lectern, his hands thrust into his pockets, an intense, shy academic. His witness was the librarian from the tiny Idaho town closest to his cabin. He was one of her hundred or so patrons. She’d known him about ten years.

  “How often would you say I came into the library?”

  “At least once a month,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “More often in the winter when you could get a ride into town with the mailman.”

  The mail bomber hitching a ride with the mailman. If we’d been anywhere else, someone would have laughed.

  Bobby asked the librarian how much interaction they had.

  “Quite a lot,” she said. “I helped you obtain books and journals from other libraries, to locate academic publications, to hunt down obscure volumes.”

  “How would you describe me in our interactions?”

  “You were always polite and appreciative.” Her voice had grown more certain. She seemed to really like Bobby. “I enjoyed the professional challenge you gave me.”

  “In our work together over ten years, did I ever seem crazy or mentally impaired to you.”

  “No,” she said, this answer coming more slowly than the others.

  Sara tapped my knee and shook her head almost imperceptibly in disbelief. We’d learned to communicate in court with the barest of expression. We could have been spies. I closed my eyes in shared concern.

  “Do you have computers connected to the Internet at the library that anyone can use?”

  “We have three for public use.”

  “Did you see me using those computers?”

  “Yes I did.”

  “Could someone use one of your computers to publish his ideas online, making them available for anyone to appropriate?”

  The lead prosecutor objected. “Calls for speculation,” he said. The judge agreed, telling the jury to ignore the question. But Bobby had gotten his point across. Anyone could have cribbed his ideas. Even the Cal Bomber.

  Bobby thanked the librarian and went to his seat, a look of quiet satisfaction on his face. The prosecutor said he had no questions for the witness. He could afford to let the mouse scamper awhile before he pounced.

  Sara leaned across our mother, whispered in my ear, “Bobby’s got to have more than this.” He does, I thought.

  The judge addressed Bobby: “Mr. Askedahl, on Friday you made a request to call a witness who has been in court for the trial. Generally, witnesses are excluded from being present during the trial. However, since neither side has invoked Rule 615, which would have barred the witness from testifying, and there has been no objection from the government, I’m going to allow it.”

  There was a slight stir as the spectators tried to connect the dots, but Sara got it immediately. I felt the burning of her shocked, incredulous glare. Then Bobby rose, and in a clear voice called my name.

  The courtroom murmur sounded like blood in my ears. The judge pounded his gavel. I thought I heard Sara whispering “no” as I rose too quickly from my seat. When the bailiff opened the gate for me, I w
anted to take his arm to steady me on the walk toward the witness box. But he was not my father, and I was no bride.

  My hand on the Bible, did I swear to tell the truth? My throat was so dry, I wanted to ask for water, but I didn’t know if I could. My brother asked the judge if he could approach me.

  “Are you nervous?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. When he smiled, I felt a rush of affection.

  He asked my name, my occupation.

  “Natalie Askedahl. Third-grade teacher and mother.”

  We established that I was his younger sister and that I did not use my husband’s name. My brother’s face seemed the only friendly place in the room.

  “In your own words, would you describe what kind of brother I was to you?”

  “Loving, gentle, patient. You never talked down or brushed me aside.” My voice was shaky, too emotional. I took a breath. “You taught me to tell time, to appreciate nature, to recognize constellations, to play chess. How to ride a bike. You listened when I talked.”

  Bobby held up his hand as if in modesty. “Did you ever see me hurt anyone or anything?”

  “Never.”

  “To show prejudice toward any group?”

  “No.”

  “In recent months, you visited me on two separate occasions in the Sacramento County Jail, is that correct?”

  I pressed my hands against my trembling legs. “Yes,” I said.

  “Did I act in any way mentally ill or impaired on any of the occasions you visited me?”

  I heard the breath come out of me, quick, sharp, and painful, magnified by the microphone at my side. Bobby looked at me suddenly uncertain. I was taking too long.

  “No,” I said. It was the truth, as well as a lie.

  “In the last fifteen years before I was arrested, how many times would you say we saw each in person or spoke on the phone?”

  “Once.”

  “Did we correspond?”

  “I wrote you a few letters, sent some cards, but you never wrote me back.”

  “Do you think your husband liked me?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But if we were not communicating and your impression of me was as you described, why would you contact the FBI about me?”

  I tried to think, to say it simply. “You wrote a letter to our mother that had some similar ideas to the Cal Bomber’s manifesto. When a bomb killed three people in Berkeley, I needed to know that it couldn’t have been you. That I wasn’t hiding anything that could help catch this person.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I took the manifesto and the letter to my husband at his office.”

  “At the law firm of Sterling, Talbot where he was a partner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does his firm represent the University of California among other well-known clients?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did your husband do?”

  “He read what I brought him, then he consulted with another lawyer from the firm.”

  “What did this lawyer do?”

  “He arranged for the FBI to meet with us at the firm.”

  “Hmm,” Bobby said, as if there was something ominous in what I just said.

  “Did you speak to them alone?”

  “My husband and his partner were present.”

  “Did you identify me to the FBI as the Cal Bomber?”

  “I did not,” I said, strength in my voice at last.

  “Did the FBI indicate to you that they thought the bomber could be me?”

  “No. They said they were pursuing many leads in the case. That you didn’t fit their profile.”

  ”Did you speak without any preconditions?”

  “No,” I said. “We needed the FBI’s assurance that if our information led to your conviction, the government would not pursue the death penalty.”

  “Why was that so important to you?”

  “We were coming to them freely without any obligation to do it. We were providing them with information they couldn’t get anywhere else. I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear it if that information were to lead to your death.”

  “Did the FBI agree to your precondition?”

  “They gave us their word.”

  “Their word,” he repeated. “Did you have any other preconditions?”

  “Yes, that our tip would remain completely anonymous.”

  “Why was that important to you?”

  “I wanted to protect my family, and safeguard my children. I didn’t want to break our mother’s heart. I didn’t want you to bear the hurt that I could have suspected you.”

  Bobby flinched ever so slightly at my last sentence, his eyes showing surprise or maybe it was anger. Then he regained his footing. “Did you remain cooperative with the FBI after I was arrested?”

  “No.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Because they betrayed us. They’d lied to our faces.”

  “The government lied,” Bobby repeated.

  I looked at my brother and he smiled. “Thank you. That’s all.”

  Bobby walked back to his table. I tensed, waiting for my cross-­examination. The lead prosecutor looked up. “No questions, Your Honor,” he said. He didn’t have to ask me any. I’d already given him everything he could hope for. I’d made Bobby seem perfectly sane.

  I went back to my seat. I had nowhere else to go. Sara refused to look at me. My mother was crying quietly.

  My brother called his next witness. A trim, bald man in a dark suit took the stand. He was the FBI special agent who had written the affidavit for the warrant to search Bobby’s cabin. Bobby asked for permission to read from it.

  “In other words,” he said after reading aloud a brief section, “you claimed here that you possessed definitive DNA tests pointing to me as the Cal Bomber?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it say anywhere in your affidavit that seven million Americans might also be the Cal Bomber based on the same DNA tests?”

  “No,” the agent said.

  “Does it say anywhere in this document that the FBI had other suspects for these bombings?”

  “I don’t believe so,” he said.

  Bobby read from a section that said Eric and I had provided strong accusatory statements that Robert Askedahl was the Cal Bomber. “But in fact, my sister and her husband did not identify me as the Cal Bomber, correct?”

  He hesitated. “Yes,” he said.

  “In other words, the government lied to get their search warrant.”

  The prosecutor was on his feet objecting. The judge had the statement stricken.

  “No more questions, Your Honor,” Bobby said as if he were a lawyer on television.

  The prosecutor, tall and steadfast, his light-colored, thinning hair combed back, rose from his seat. He held up the full bound document that Bobby had read from so we could see just how thick it was. He showed the file to the agent to establish that it was the affidavit used to request the search warrant in question.

  “How many pages long is it?”

  The agent knew without looking. “It is ninety-five pages long.”

  “Ninety-five pages of probable cause that implicate Robert Askedahl as the Cal Bomber.” The prosecutor showed the agent a section, and asked him to describe what was detailed on the page.

  “It is a list of canceled checks made out to Robert Askedahl from his family, and the dates he deposited them.”

  My mother stiffened beside me, her gasp so quiet I barely heard it.

  The prosecutor went through the checks one by one. My mother had sent the majority, but I had sent two and Sara one. Each check was posted a few weeks before a device was planted or a bomb went off. I had sent the last one. My brother had cashed it six weeks before the Berkeley bombing.

  The lawyer worked his way through the other documents, one by one, each more damning than the last. He ended with my own statement to the FBI of when I’d last seen m
y brother before his arrest: the accidental meeting at my mother’s with the girls in their fancy Christmas dresses. A mail bomb had been sent from Sacramento the same week.

  My neck ached from holding up my head. I glanced at my watch. Ten forty-five.

  Bobby called his next witness, the sheriff of the county where my brother had lived. The sheriff, a big, rugged man with a silver mustache—he could play his own role in the TV movie of the trial—testified that the FBI had kept his department in the dark when they staked out Bobby’s cabin.

  “Is it unusual that an outside law enforcement agency would not inform local enforcement of a stakeout of this kind?”

  “Unusual? Disgusting is more like it. They violated law enforcement protocol.”

  “So the FBI could have done anything they wanted at the cabin without being observed?”

  The prosecutor objected and the judge agreed, but it didn’t matter. Bobby had finished with his surprisingly sympathetic witness.

  The prosecution declined a rebuttal and it soon became clear that Bobby had no other witnesses to call to the stand. The judge brought down his gavel against the buzz in the courtroom, then ordered both sides to be ready with closing arguments at eight the next morning. Moments later, he adjourned the court.

  The room seemed overly bright. There was commotion all around me, a reporter appearing at my side.

  “I can’t talk,” I said, wondering how I would make it through the rest of the day.

  chapter forty-nine

  RAIN STRIKING the windshield, I drove my mother home in silence, my body aching as if I’d taken a fall. When we got there, my mother hung up her coat and put a chef’s white apron over her dress. I watched as she measured coffee into the percolator she still used, and made little sandwiches out of soft dinner rolls.

  “How did everything go so wrong?” she asked, her back to me.

  I didn’t know if she meant Bobby’s defending himself, my testimony, or something much greater.