Trust Me

by Javorsky, Earl

  They drove in silence for a while, Ron content just to have Leanne close by, this old friendship with its brand new dimension, so full of promise and so natural in its unfolding. After a while he put an old Yusef Latif CD on and the hypnotic lines of the sax took them through Irvine and Laguna Niguel, past San Clemente and down into the clear open land of Camp Pendleton.

  “Everything seems to change right through here,” Leanne said over the music.

  “I know,” he replied. “The sky seems bigger.”

  “And bluer. I like it.”

  He left the freeway at Carlsbad Village Drive and drove west almost to the coast before turning into a parking area that serviced some attractive shops, a small resort, and a Mexican restaurant with a sign that said, “Welcome to Fidel’s.”

  They both ordered chicken tostadas and ice tea. When the waitress left Leanne said, “I hope they cook their chicken properly here.” There was a twinkle in her eye.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Fidel’s was an attractive place and a very good restaurant, and he was surprised that Leanne would question it.

  “Well,” Leanne said, dipping a chip into the guacamole they had been served, “I just saw an article on contaminated chicken. You can get food poisoning from some kind of bacteria . . .”

  “Salmonella,” he said, and then saw that Leanne was looking down at the table in front of her, her long hair almost hiding the expression on her face. She was barely suppressing a laugh.

  ⍫

  It took another twenty minutes to get from Fidel’s to Escondido. Heading inland, the scenery went from coastal eclectic to a uniformity of pink houses with rust-colored tile roofs and then became suddenly rural where the development stopped and the original flavor of San Diego County had been left intact. Then, as they got farther east, a new flavor, city-in-the-desert, took over.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” Leanne asked, after he had made several seemingly random turns and they wound up back on the main road they had come in on. She seemed amused.

  He looked at his notes, which were scrawled on a pad that extended from a suction cup that adhered to the dash panel. “McAllister Road was supposed to run into Old Grove, but it didn’t. Or at least, I didn’t see it.” He turned the car around and backtracked to McAllister. This time, by going straight instead of following the curve of the road, they wound up on Old Grove, winding uphill with a ravine to their right. A sudden left turn took them away from the ravine and into a private drive. Next to an open gate a sign said, “Welcome to the VALLEY VIEW RETIREMENT COMMUNITY.”

  “How old is this woman?” Leanne asked.

  He slowed the Land Rover. The road had narrowed and now curved sharply uphill. “Our therapist friend’s records show him to be fifty-five, and she’s six years older, so . . .”

  They pulled over a rise and suddenly came out on a plateau. To the left was a spectacular view of the lower hills and, beyond that, the sprawling valley city of Escondido. To the right was a long row of mobile homes, though mobility was not one of their features. Each qualified as a small house, with a patch of lawn and a garden or shrubbery separating it from the drive. Beyond the first row stretched other rows of identical homes.

  A sign on the front door of the first structure said “MANAGER.” He pulled up to the empty carport next to it. A long ramp gently inclined up to the door. He had just stepped on the ramp, Leanne behind him, when a voice came from behind a screen door.

  “Can I help you?” It was an unfriendly voice, not very convincing in its offer to help. The screen door remained closed.

  “Yes,” he said. “We’re looking for Phyllis Stanley. I understand she lives here.”

  “What do you want?” He could make out the outline of a person on the other side of the screen. A person sitting at the doorway.

  “I’d like to ask her a few questions, that’s all.” He had the feeling that if this guardian of the community wanted to, she could prevent them from finding Art’s sister, and that their whole trip would be in vain. He wondered if phoning ahead would have been the better way to go.

  “What kind of questions?” The voice maintained its suspicious tone; the figure behind the screen didn’t move.

  “I’d rather take that up with Ms. Stanley.”

  The voice said, “She’s not talking to anyone. Goodbye.”

  It was hot in the mid-afternoon sun. A faint tang of sage wafted in on the breeze off the hillside. He looked down the row of mobile homes. A large American flag stuck out from the roof of the fourth home, and a thin old man with a powder-blue hat and gardening gloves pruned a rosebush below the trellised porch. Maybe, he thought, the old man will help us.

  As Ron turned, Leanne called out, “We’re worried about her brother. We thought maybe she could help.”

  There was a silence that seemed almost universal. Even the old man had stopped moving. Then the screen door slowly opened.

  “Who are you?” The woman sat in a wheelchair, an expensive motorized one with a small tray in front of her like the kind that folds out from an airline seat. Her left hand operated the controls on the armrest. There was a cigarette in her right hand and a large glass half full of amber liquid on the tray.

  Ron introduced himself and Leanne. He didn’t mention working for the Times.

  “How do you know my brother?”

  He had interviewed thousands of people in his career. Death row inmates, police, politicians, athletes, astronauts, and children, but somehow found himself unprepared for the question. As he searched for a response, Leanne said, “Your brother Jack tried to kill someone.” Well, there it was.

  “Take it to the police.” The woman sat there, unmoving, her chair half in and half out of the doorway, the screen door propped open behind her by one of the large wheels. Her hair was steel-gray, swept back from her forehead and fastened severely in the back. Her features were well defined, eyes the same piercing blue that he remembered from seeing Art at the SOL meetings. Once, he thought, she might have been an attractive woman. Now she looked hardened by smoke and alcohol, by life and the desert; her skin was parched and dark, lined like a dry creek bed. A delicate gold crucifix hung from her neck.

  Leanne said, “He pushed a young woman off a pier. At night.”

  Phyllis Stanley flinched, but contained it, tried to stop it, as though struck and too proud to acknowledge the insult. She reached for the glass and he saw, as she lifted it, that her hand shook. He wondered if it had been like that before Leanne had spoken.

  The woman took her time draining the glass, staring out at him over the rim as she drank. When she was done, she took a long drag on the cigarette and then blew the smoke out so that it went upward and sideways from the corner of her mouth. “What do you want from me?”

  “We’d like,” he said, “to understand him. We think that he has harmed others. He needs to be stopped.”

  “I am not my brother’s keeper.” The woman sat erect in her chair, as unmoving and unblinking as a lizard on a hot rock.

  “Maybe not now, but you certainly were back in North Vancouver.” He watched the woman’s eyes as they registered suspicion and flicked to Leanne, then back to him.

  “So, you’re police.”

  “No, but they’re right behind us.” He held her gaze.

  The woman’s hand went to her crucifix and caressed it. There was another long silence. It seemed as though measurements were being taken, history reviewed, values and costs weighed, all behind that penetrating stare, before everything seemed to click into place like a lock on a safe and a surrender was made. Phyllis Stanley breathed deeply, then looked down at the gold cross. “All right.” She looked back up, then pushed a button on the console with her left hand and maneuvered the wheelchair down the ramp.

  CHAPTER 53

  ⍫

  Phyllis Stanley’s wheelchair hummed slightly as
it led the way across the gravel drive to a ten-foot-wide strip of lawn. Ron and Leanne followed until the woman stopped at the far edge of the grass strip; from here the hillside of scrub brush and mesquite dropped off steeply and the view looked out on a panorama of the valley.

  “I have always feared this moment.” The woman’s hand, Ron noticed, still rested on the control console of the wheelchair, her finger poised over the forward button, as if on a whim she might launch herself over the edge and down into the gully below. Her fingers were long and slender, her hands surprisingly attractive. “Even God couldn’t ease the fear.”

  “What have you been afraid of?” Leanne asked. She held Ron’s hand as they stood at the woman’s side.

  “That my brother would finally cause trouble. Real trouble. Followed the Devil’s path, I would have called it—” she paused “—when I had faith.”

  “What happened?” He felt the softness of Leanne’s skin, the welcome kiss of a gusting breeze, and wondered if Phyllis Stanley had any people in her life, friendships, a partner.

  “To my faith?” She reached down by her side and produced a pint bottle of Seagram’s 7 and poured decisively into her cup. “I have faith in this now. It gives me solace, while it lasts, where otherwise there is none.”

  A hawk circled against the stark desert sky, drifting with a predatory economy of motion. It rose effortlessly on a thermal and then hung, suspended, before spiraling down into the gully. Leanne reached out and touched the woman’s shoulder. “Tell us about your brother.”

  “Yes . . . my little brother.” Phyllis Stanley nodded thoughtfully, and then went on. “You know, I tried to offer Jackie a good life, but too much had already happened. God knows, the boy never really had a chance. I couldn’t help him, and he wouldn’t seek salvation in the Church. He was too damaged by then.”

  Leanne pressed on. “How was he damaged?”

  “Hah!” It was a bitter snort of a laugh. “When Jackie was first learning to walk, I remember our father slapping the back of his head. Knocked him down face first on the concrete driveway. He didn’t stop doing that until he disappeared three years later.”

  “Disappeared?” He remembered Peter’s report: “Father’s whereabouts unknown.”

  “That’s what he did.” The woman took a deep draught of her whiskey. “He left the house drunk one night and never came back. We lived in fear of the day of his return for a year, and then our mother gave his clothes to charity. We had two glorious years after that. Best years of my life.”

  “He came back?” Leanne said. She would, he thought, have been a good interviewer, the way she could draw a story out of a reluctant witness.

  “No. Much worse. Mother brought Harold home . . .” The woman drank again, then lit a cigarette. He noticed that her hands were steady as she lit the match and brought it to the tobacco. “And from then on, Harold ran that house like Stalin ran Russia.”

  “And he beat Jack?” Ron asked.

  “Oh, no. He had a special fondness for little Jackie. A very special fondness.”

  He had a feeling about where this was going. “How did he show that fondness?”

  “Oh, well, I didn’t see it now, did I? But little Jackie always threw up after he came out of the room they were in, so you use your imagination.” She cocked her head and squinted at them, the first time she had looked up since beginning her story.

  “Where,” Leanne asked, “was your mother while this was happening?”

  “She was working. Somebody had to, and Harold wasn’t about to any more than good old Dad ever had.”

  “Didn’t your brother say anything to her?”

  The woman looked back out at the valley. The gully below was already in shadow as the sun moved toward the sea behind them. “Oh, he tried, but she wouldn’t have any of it. Told him he was a liar, that he was living in a fantasy world, and anyway, didn’t he see he was better off not getting beat all the time.” She shook her head, almost imperceptibly, as if inwardly facing something she refused to accept.

  “How long did this go on?” Leanne asked.

  “Almost two years.” Phyllis Stanley pushed a button on her console and the wheelchair turned so that she faced him and Leanne. She picked up her glass, which was half full, and drained it quickly, then brushed at her upper lip with the tips of her fingers. “One day we took a day trip to Vancouver Island. A picnic at the park, looking out over the bay. Pretending to be a nice little family. Hah!” Another bitter snort, followed by a fit of coughing. “Mother and Harold were standing at the cliff, watching the boats. Jackie was . . . I don’t know. He must have been nearby. I was reading a book. That’s what I did. I read anything I could find that would take me away.”

  In the distance, a pair of military helicopters crossed the sky, heading north. Probably, he thought, to Camp Pendleton, just past Oceanside. He wondered why he had come, how this pathetic story was going to help him, what his motives had been. And why should Leanne be part of this? What had he expected to hear about a psychopath’s childhood?

  No one spoke for several minutes. The woman finished her cigarette and stubbed it out in a shot glass that served as an ashtray. Then she resumed her story. “I heard my mother shout, ‘Hey!’ and then scream, but when I looked up she wasn’t there . . .” She stopped again.

  “Yes . . .?” Leanne prompted.

  “I heard Harold call Jackie a crazy little son of a bitch and start beating on him. I looked around, but mother had disappeared. I got up and walked over to where Jackie was lying on the ground and saw Harold go to the edge of the cliff and look down. He was shaking his head and looking all around. Then he just took off. He must have run all the way back to the ferry landing and caught the first boat back.”

  “Where was your mother?” he asked, even though he already knew the answer.

  “She was on the rocks far below, half in the water. The Harbor Patrol took us home. A week later the RCMP picked up Harold trying to cross into Washington state. He tried to convince them that Jackie had pushed our mother, but they weren’t having any of it.”

  “What happened to him?” he asked.

  “He went to prison. They gave him twenty-five years, but he got killed after two. Someone stabbed him in the neck with a homemade knife.”

  Leanne said, “So then it was just the two of you.”

  “That’s right.” The woman wheeled the chair around and headed back toward her home. As they crossed the drive she said, “I gave the next five years of my life trying to make it right for that boy, but it wasn’t enough.” When she reached the bottom of the ramp leading to her front door, she turned to face them. “That’s all. I haven’t seen him in years. He used to visit, send money once in a while. It helped.” She nodded, as if in dismissal, and turned to negotiate the ramp.

  “Do you know where he is now?” He had a feeling she had left something out.

  Phyllis Stanley pressed the button that took her wheelchair to the doorway of her mobile home and then turned so she could back in through the threshold. She disappeared into the mobile home for a moment. When she returned she leaned down and passed him a photograph and a folded piece of paper.

  Ron looked at the photo and showed it to Leanne. It was a faded black-and-white of two children, a boy and a girl in what looked to be a backyard. Between them stood a woman in her mid twenties. Tall, slender, attractive, and blond.

  Leanne studied the photograph and handed it back to the older woman.

  “He’s staying with some people in Brentwood. That’s the number he left.” She guided the wheelchair backward again, pushing the door open behind her.

  “Miss Stanley?” Leanne called out.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t mean to get too personal, but would you tell us how you came to be . . . um . . . how you hurt yourself?”

  She looked down at them, harsh and distant as when
their visit had begun, and said, “I fell.”

  CHAPTER 54

  ⍫

  When Jeff arrived at Holly’s around ten that evening, his first thought was that she looked pretty frayed at the edges. The first time he had seen her, that night at the SOL meeting, Holly, dressed in faded blue jeans and a simple white sleeveless blouse, had looked terrific. Beautiful, unattainable, the kind of girl he could only think about and desire from a distance. The next time, she had been dripping wet in her clothes, fresh from the Malibu surf, grim and pale, although on the following day she had put it back together and looked great again.

  This time, Holly had that look he knew so well; he had seen it too many times before in the mirror—the no-sleep, running on coffee and nerves and whatever-else-it-takes look. When she answered the door, wearing cutoff jeans and an Elton John tee shirt, she didn’t even say hello; she motioned him in, leaned out the doorway and looked up the stairway immediately on the right and down the hallway beyond it. Then she ducked back in and locked the deadbolt that he had put in a few days before.

  “Look at this. You won’t believe it,” Holly said. There were clothes all over the floor of the hallway, mainly coats and jackets. The hall closet, just to the right of the front door, was open, a bare bulb illuminating its interior. The closet ceiling sloped up from left to right, conforming to the stairway outside. On the floor inside the closet, the carpet had been ripped up and peeled back, exposing a trap door.

  “Pull it up,” Holly said.

  He looked at her questioningly, uncomfortable with her intensity, the nervous edge to her command. He squatted at the entrance to the closet and lifted the loose plywood square from the floor.

  About two and a half feet down was hard-packed dirt. He saw footprints in the dusty surface immediately below. To the right, leading into the darkness of the crawlspace, were other marks, like tracks—the kind, he thought, that someone would make if they were crawling on hands and knees.