Empty Promises

by Ann Rule

  But Robin had terrifying dreams the night before their trip. Something indefinable frightened her and she woke knowing only that her nightmares had something to do with their planned outing in the mountains. The next morning she mentioned her fears to a girlfriend, who suggested she take her Bible with her on the trip. "If you have your Bible with you," she said, "you know everything will be all right."

  Robin tucked her much-read Bible into her backpack, but she was still afraid. She told Hank about her dreams, and he too admitted that he felt a presentiment of danger, something that was totally unlike him. Just to be on the safe side, he suggested they stop and ask a friend of his to go along with them for the weekend, but the friend wasn't home. They left him a note which read, "We were by to ask you to go to the mountains with us. Sorry you missed the fun!"

  The sun was shining, the weather was perfect, and Robin and Hank tried to shake off their forebodings. They bought fishing licenses and canned food, and they gassed up their car. That left them with about twenty dollars to cover any emergencies.

  They drove the twenty miles from Molalla to Estacada, and headed south. Somehow though, they missed the turn leading into the Austin Hot Springs campground and turned instead into the road leading into Bagby Hot Springs. They drove deep into the wilderness before they realized they were heading in the wrong direction. "This road is so much spookier than I remember it," Hank commented when he failed to recognize any landmarks. "In fact, it's so spooky, it gives me the creeps. It's like no other road I've ever been on."

  Once they realized they'd taken a wrong turn, they retraced their path. By then they had used up a quarter of a tank of gas, they were running late, and they finally arrived at the Austin Hot Springs campground just as the gates were being locked for the night. All the camping spots were taken.

  The park ranger told them they could park outside and walk back in. "You can cook your supper, take a dip in the hot springs, and you can fish, just so long as you don't camp inside the park tonight."

  Robin and Hank cooked dinner, laughed at some people who were skinny-dipping, and took Rusty for a walk in the woods. They felt better and their spooky feelings now seemed silly.

  Still, they didn't want to camp alone; they wanted to park near other campers, and they finally found an enclave of Russian families and parked their sedan close to them. They slept in the car with the doors locked. They were having a restless night with Rusty jumping on them and whining. They finally got up, made their way down to the Clackamas River by flashlight, and gave the dog a drink of water. Then they returned to the car and settled down for the night.

  They woke at six the next morning. It was Friday, July 23. The park ranger said there was a spot available inside the park now and he directed them to the campsite. Robin cooked breakfast while Hank fished. But he had no luck, and they swam in the hot springs instead. There were people all around them, including the families they'd met the night before, and Robin felt safe enough when Hank headed farther upriver to try his luck again.

  The only bad moment she experienced was when a man yelled at her for letting Rusty swim in the springs. "They're for people, not dogs," he complained. "You could get slapped with a $500 fine."

  "He's probably cleaner than you, most likely," she'd called back, as she tugged the collie out of the water.

  Hank was gone fishing a long time, at least two hours, and Robin began to worry. When he finally showed up, he was grinning and soaked to the skin. "You almost lost me," he laughed. "I was helping some of those Russians ford the river with a rope and I hit a sinkhole and started going under some white water— until I grabbed a branch and got my footing."

  Robin had been so worried that she was mad at him at first, but she relented. "I'm sorry I yelled at you," she apologized. "I thought something had happened to you, and I got scared."

  Hank Marcus was a big man— 6 feet tall, 185 pounds. He was fully capable of taking care of both of them. He soothed Robin, pointing out all the people around them, saying there just wasn't anything for her to be so afraid of. She was timid without him, though, and tended to worry far more than she needed to.

  It was a good afternoon. They frolicked in the hot springs and talked to the Russian families. One of the men made a pass at Robin as he carried her across the river and she deliberately stepped on his boat, swamping it. Later, Hank laughed when she told him what she'd done. He wasn't jealous of her; he had no need to be.

  But Hank was disappointed with the trip so far; he still hadn't caught any fish, so they broke camp and headed up the road to give it another try. Robin cooked a late lunch while Hank tried out the new fishing spot. They said grace before they ate, as they always did.

  That evening, while it was still light out, they drove farther and farther downstream looking for signs of fish in the river. They passed a lone man fishing and asked him if the fish were biting. He shrugged and said, "I haven't caught anything all day." So they kept on driving.

  They came upon another fisherman, who told them he had only caught three fish all afternoon, "and they weren't keepers." But he told them he'd heard that a truckload of fish had been dumped into the Colawash River earlier in the week. "Ask about that up at the ranger station," he suggested.

  Hank and Robin were undecided whether to stay or head home. Their gas was getting dangerously low now, and they hadn't found any good fishing at all. For Hank's sake, Robin suggested they try just one more spot before going home.

  The road they chose took them deep into the woods as the long shadows of evening closed over them. They came upon a small boat-launch area near the North Fork Dam and stopped to watch some children playing in the river. They were parked at the side of the road when a red pickup pulled up. It was an old truck, road-worn and mud-covered, with a broken tailgate and a crumpled bumper. The lone occupant was a short youngish man. He left his engine running as he got out and ran up the fish ladder.

  Hank Marcus went over to talk to the stranger. Robin waited in their car; the windows were open, and she could hear snatches of their conversation. Hank was telling the man that the fishing prospects seemed to be nil in the area. "All we found were a couple of suckers," he said.

  The stranger didn't even turn to look at Hank. He mumbled something and kept staring out at the river. But when Robin got out of the car and walked toward the two men, the man turned to look at her and she felt his eyes burning into her. "It was almost as if he'd never seen a woman before," she recalled. "He lit up like a Christmas tree."

  Suddenly he smiled and turned back to Hank. "I know where they just dumped a whole truckload of fish," he said. "I was just up there working when they dumped them off the bridge. That's where I'm headed."

  Since the other fisherman had also told them about the fish dump, it seemed reasonable that this stranger, who said his name was Tom, was telling the truth. Hank was really tempted, but he worried about his nearly empty gas tank. Tom told them that it wasn't that far— they had more than enough gas to make it, adding, "Besides, I can go to town in the morning and bring back gas if you run low."

  They decided to follow Tom to the place where he said he'd seen the fresh dump of fish. The two-vehicle caravan wended its way slowly down the deserted road. At one point, Tom pulled the truck over and suggested that they ride with him so that they wouldn't run out of gas, but Robin shook her head, and Hank shrugged. She wanted to stay in their own car; the feeling of uneasiness that had plagued her for the past two days had returned.

  "Just where is this spot?" Hank asked.

  "Just beyond the Bagby Hot Springs Road."

  Hank and Robin looked at each other; that was the road that had frightened them when they'd taken it by mistake the day before. It had given them both goose pimples on a hot day. They whispered to each other about turning back, but they finally decided to go on. "It's silly for us to be afraid of a road," Hank reassured Robin.

  They passed a man and his daughter they'd camped with the night before, and Robin felt better; they we
re nice, normal people and seeing them here on this road allayed her fears.

  Hank looked over at Robin and grinned. "See, things always work out. It's neat that we met Tom. If we hadn't been at the dam at that precise minute, we wouldn't have had this chance to catch some fish. We probably would have just gone home and lost the whole weekend."

  Up ahead, Tom turned onto an old dirt road that was bumpy and deeply rutted. They could no longer see much of the landscape because the sun had dropped below the horizon, and it was that time of evening between dusk and full dark. They pulled in behind the glowing taillights of Tom's red pickup.

  They lit a fire, and Tom pulled out a bottle of liquor and offered them a drink. To be polite, they each took a little sip. Then Tom pulled something out of his truck. It was a milk carton with a dead bird in it. "See this?" he bragged. "I picked it off on the way down here."

  Robin felt her stomach turn over. "We don't believe in killing things for sport," she murmured. "Not unless you have to— for food."

  "Oh, don't worry," Tom said. "I plan on eating it."

  After they ate, Tom grabbed a rifle from his truck and called to Hank and Robin to join him on a walk. They came to a clearing in the midst of the lowering pine and fir forest and Tom told them that this was where he did his hunting. "If we got a deer, we could eat only the hindquarters. We could be wasteful masters," he said. It was an odd term. Robin had never heard it before.

  "That's illegal," Hank said.

  Tom only laughed and shrugged.

  They shared Tom's binoculars, and there was just enough light to see a deer foraging in the clearing and, farther on, some bear cubs playing. Tom raised his gun, sighting in on them, but he didn't shoot. Robin heard him cock the gun, and she quickly turned her back in disapproval and horror. She tugged on Hank's arm and pleaded, "I want to go back to camp right now. If he shoots a cub, the mother will kill all of us!"

  Tom smiled, his teeth white in the dusk, and lowered the gun. They made their way back to the campfire.

  Hank and Robin prepared to sleep in their car again.

  "I'll rap on your hood in the morning when I get up," Tom said, "about five."

  Alone in their car, with Rusty tied outside, Robin told Hank she didn't like Tom. "He seems to enjoy killing for its own sake," she whispered.

  Hank held her close and said softly, "You just have to understand everyone in his own way, honey."

  Hank was like that. He didn't judge people— he accepted them, but Robin felt an overwhelming rush of fear that she couldn't shake. She clung to Hank all night. While she watched him as he slept, she had a numbing thought. What would she do if something took him away from her? She loved him so much, but she knew that sometimes there was nothing she could do to stop whatever Fate had planned for them.

  At dawn on Saturday, July 24, they awoke to Tom pounding on the hood of their car. They'd slept in their clothes, and now they hurriedly pulled their shoes on. The three of them agreed they would fish before breakfast and Tom drove them in his truck deeper into the woods to a large clearing. He had trouble finding the trail, and Robin found this odd since he'd told them that he came here to hunt every weekend.

  They finally found the path and headed up the overgrown trail. Robin ran ahead with Rusty and waited for Tom and Hank to catch up. The sun was shining now, and there were field daisies and wildflowers growing everywhere. The night's dread began to recede.

  They had to climb over logs and rocks to reach the riverbank. Once there, Robin and Hank sat on a rock, and Tom stayed behind them. They all threw lines in, but their luck was no better here than it had been anywhere else. None of them caught anything.

  Suddenly Robin felt prickles running up and down her spine and she sensed that Tom was pointing his gun at them. But when she turned to look, he was staring elsewhere, his gun cradled carelessly in his arms.

  They decided to go back to camp and fix breakfast. They wouldn't have the fresh fish they'd counted on, but Robin would manage to throw something together. They were tired from tromping through the thick woods and climbing over deadfalls, and so they rested on a log along the trail. Robin whistled, and a bird flew close to them, checking to see if she was a bird, too.

  She started to make a joke about her name being ap propriate when Tom's rifle roared. He fired repeatedly at the birds all around them. Eerily, the more he fired, the closer the birds came.

  "Why do they do that?" Robin asked. Tom seemed to have some weird aura about him.

  "They're curious about the sound," he explained.

  "Haven't you got better things to do than try to kill poor little birds?"

  Tom didn't answer. In the sunlight when he squinted, he had eyes like a fox or a ferret; they seemed to see everything between his half-closed lids. He finally stopped firing at the birds, but he held his gun so that it appeared to be pointing at Hank, who didn't notice. Now Tom looked at their Rusty. He was stroking the dog as he said, "There're only two things wrong with Rusty," he said. "He's alive and walking."

  It was a sick joke, and neither Hank nor Robin laughed.

  Robin studied Tom. She couldn't figure him out. When he'd first seen her, his eyes had practically undressed her and he'd smiled broadly. She recognized male interest, but he'd barely glanced at her since, talking only to Hank.

  Still, Hank told her he didn't trust Tom around her. When they got back to the truck in the thick early morning heat, Robin unbuttoned her blouse, revealing her bikini top, and Hank quickly told her to button it up again. Then Hank gave her a kiss, smiled, and walked away with Tom. They each carried a gun and were headed back toward the clearing.

  Robin was alone now. She could hear the birds chirping and Rusty panting in the heat. She knew she should fix breakfast, but she was immobilized with a dread that was much worse than before. She tried whistling loudly but no one responded, not even the birds.

  And then she heard the shot. Only one shot. It reverberated through the woods until the echoes diminished into dead silence.

  She waited, wondering what the men had shot at. After a time, Tom came strolling back. "We got us a deer," he said laconically. "I need a knife to gut it out."

  Something wasn't right. Hank would have been the one to come back and tell her. He wouldn't have sent Tom back. With Rusty close beside her, she began to run toward where she'd heard the shot.

  Tom's gun roared again behind her and she looked back to see Rusty falter and fall dead in the path, his blood staining his silky sable fur. Horrified and sobbing, Robin turned toward Tom with a question on her lips. But now Tom was leveling the rifle at her.

  "You shot my dog!" she screamed.

  "Yeah, I know," Tom smiled. "I shot your husband, too."

  Tears coursed down her face, and she pleaded, "Oh, God… please don't hurt me!"

  She believed Hank was dead. She knew Rusty was dead. Robin Marcus was sixteen years old, and she was alone in the wilderness with a killer. She fully expected to die, but it didn't seem to matter much at that point; she had lost the two beings who were closest to her.

  * * *

  It would be three days— Saturday, Sunday, and Monday— before Robin would get the chance to tell anyone what had happened up there in the woods near the meadow. When she did, she appeared rational— in shock, certainly— but basically lucid.

  The detectives and attorneys who listened to her story took her at her word. They didn't understand then that they might as well have been listening to a programmed robot.

  On Tuesday, July 27, Robin Marcus and Tom Brown entered the offices of an Oregon City attorney, James O'Leary. O'Leary, who had served as Tom Brown's attorney in the past, listened while Tom and Robin explained that Brown had accidentally killed Robin's husband in the Bagby Hot Springs area on Saturday, July 24. Robin sobbed as she recalled witnessing the accident. She said that she wanted to go with Brown to talk with the Clackamas County sheriff about the incident. She didn't want him to be blamed for something that wasn't his fault.

 
; O'Leary contacted Detectives Hank Reeves and Lynn Forristall and they listened to the incredible story that Tom Brown and Robin Marcus gave. On the face of it, it seemed to be a tragic story about the accidental discharge of a gun. According to Brown, he and Hank Marcus had been looking for deer when they decided to exchange rifles. Brown said that one was a Winchester lever action and the other a .22 caliber high-power Savage. As they had passed the guns between them, Brown said one of the guns had gone off, fatally wounding Hank Marcus in the head. He died in an instant.

  Tom Brown said that after Hank died, the Marcuses' pet collie, Rusty, went wild and attacked him. Robin nodded as Tom explained that he had no choice but to shoot Rusty. In the shocked aftermath of what happened, he said he and Robin wandered the wrong way in the forest and lost their bearings for three days.

  Brown admitted that he had an extensive prior record, and conceded that this made him reluctant to report the accident. But then Robin promised to go to the authorities with him and confirm what had happened. She told him she would explain to the police that she had witnessed her husband's death, and she would verify that Tom was telling the truth.