All About Evie (ARC)

by Cathy Lamb

  “When my mother was nineteen, her mother died. She was attacked by the owner of a farm. He wasn’t even arrested. My mother met my father shortly after that, picking berries on one of his neighbor’s farms. She was soon pregnant. I have no idea if she was willing to have sex with my father or not. My mother told me later that my father told her that he would tell the authorities that she was illegal and he would allow her to be shipped back to Mexico without us if she didn’t obey him. She would never see us again. I remember”—he choked on his words—“I remember her begging him not to do that, on her knees.

  “My father wouldn’t let my mother work, would hardly ever let her leave the house. He called her fat. He called her a whore all the time. He called her a Mexican slut. He would beat her face until it swelled. I have no memory of my father ever being kind to my mother, and then, one day, she disappears. I think he killed her. We left Idaho for Oregon the day after he told us she left with a lover. Like I already said, my mother had no lover.”

  The noise in the courtroom raised again to a deafening level, and the judge pounded his gavel.

  186 Cathy Lamb

  “This is all a lie,” Alfred yelled, making sure he looked author-itative. “It’s all a lie. This is something concocted by Johnny, egged on by Betsy, to bolster their ridiculous self-defense theory.

  He’s made this up. There is no evidence that Gabriella was killed by Peter Kandinsky. None. No police reports. No witness. No photos. No body. Nothing.”

  “Objection!” Orlando shouted.

  The judge said, “I’ll allow it.”

  The trial went on, Johnny brave and composed on the stand.

  The prosecuting attorney was agitated. Angry. Who was this teenager to make a fool of him? He was Alfred Morningside! A style icon some said. A top-notch prosecutor, destined for amazing things. Plus, his shoes! Always buffed for court. “What happened after Betsy murdered your father?”

  “Betsy did not murder my father.” Johnny paused and stared right at the jury. “I did.”

  Betsy shook her head at him as her eyes welled with tears.

  “No!” Alfred shouted at him, his pin-striped suit straining.

  “You didn’t. Betsy did. You stood by and let it happen. You planned it together.”

  “No,” Johnny said. “I killed him. My prints are on the knife.”

  The prosecutor seethed. “That’s because you lived at the house. The knife came from the kitchen. Her prints are on the knife, too. Betsy herself even told the police that she did it.” For effect the prosecutor turned and pointed a finger at Betsy. Oh, how he loved to point! “That she was the guilty one.”

  “I told the police I did it,” Johnny said. “She lied to protect me, but I’m telling the truth.”

  Chaos again.

  “Your Honor,” the prosecutor said, sweating, his perfectly coiffed hair coming loose from his hair gel, “Johnny did not wield the knife, Betsy did. He’s trying to put doubt in the jurors’

  minds. He’s deliberately trying to turn all evidence over to cause confusion and a mistrial, which will serve his agenda. He’s trying to get them both off! This is an attack on the court and our

  ALL ABOUT EVIE 187

  system of government and justice itself and the United States of America and our Constitution!” he pontificated, wielding his pointer finger in the air like a pinwheel.

  The judge told him to sit down now and yelled for “order in the court!”

  Amidst the raised voices and the astonishment from everyone in the courtroom, Johnny winked, ever so slightly, at his beloved Betsy. She saw it through the tears streaming from her eyes.

  Betsy was on the stand the next day. She was grilled and drilled by the prosecutor.

  “What happened the day that Peter Kaminsky was killed?”

  Alfred was wearing a different pin-striped suit and had a crisply ironed purple handkerchief in his pocket. He had practiced in front of his mirror again the night before to polish his image and was satisfied with his performance. Drama classes had truly helped him over the years. Maybe he should have been on the stage as a Broadway actor? But no. He liked to win, at all costs.

  “I ran to Johnny’s house after work.” She twisted her hands in her lap, in the same blue suit as the day before.

  “Why?” said the prosecutor, but he knew. He’d seen the police reports.

  “Because I . . .” Betsy stopped, swallowed hard. She knew no one would believe her, but she had to say it. “Because I knew that Peter was going to kill Johnny.”

  “How did you know that?” He raised his ever-so-slightly plucked eyebrows at her.

  “Because I had . . .” She blinked rapidly. “A premonition.”

  “A what?” The prosecutor pretended surprise, as if he couldn’t believe that such a stupid thing had come out of her mouth.

  Betsy had already told the police about the premonition the night that Peter died, the night she stabbed him. She was eighteen. She was scared and traumatized, so she simply told the truth. She didn’t want to kill anyone, ever. She did it to save Johnny, she told them.

  188 Cathy Lamb

  “A premonition?”

  “Objection, Your Honor,” Betsy’s attorney, Shaylee, stood.

  “She doesn’t mean a real premonition, she means that she had a bad feeling. Only that. She and Johnny shared everything. Johnny shared his fear of his father, the abuse, that they’d been fighting, so Betsy simply thought that things were going badly at Johnny’s house, as we all get bad feelings sometimes.”

  “Overruled.”

  “What do you mean a premonition?” Alfred pressed on, as if Shaylee had not spoken and tried to diminish his argument.

  “You mean, you can see into the future?”

  The whole court room held their breath.

  Betsy was scared now. She knew she looked like a loon. Mentally unstable. A freak. “Yes. I knew that Peter was going to kill Johnny, that he was going to turn and grab a gun from the gun cabinet.”

  “So you killed him because you had a premonition Peter was going to shoot Johnny?” Up went those perfectly plucked eyebrows again, in disbelief.

  “Yes.” She squirmed. The police had already talked about it in front of the jury, reading from their reports about that night and their conversations with Betsy. They had read her her rights, but Betsy didn’t understand what was at stake. Her own attorneys had been appalled when they heard what she’d said to the police and had gone out that night to a bar for a couple of straight shots.

  “Johnny accused his father of killing his mother. They were fighting about that. Peter was threatening Johnny because he was afraid Johnny would go to the police, then he punched him in the face twice and Johnny fell back.”

  “Did you see the gun?”

  “No.”

  “Peter Kandinsky never pulled out a gun?”

  “No. But he was going to.”

  “So you stabbed him because you knew he was going to grab a gun because you can see the future like a gypsy? Are you magic?”

  ALL ABOUT EVIE 189

  “No, I—”

  “Objection!” Shaylee shouted.

  “Do you have a crystal ball?”

  “Objection!” Shaylee shouted again, louder.

  Johnny stood up, agitated. “No, that’s not what happened. I killed my father. My father had just punched me in the face, twice, as he had done many times before. I thought he was going to kill me. Betsy is innocent. She did nothing, it was me, I stabbed him.”

  The cacophony in the court room was deafening.

  Johnny and Betsy’s defense attorneys put up a vigorous fight.

  They said it was self-defense, that Johnny thought his life was threatened, Betsy thought his life was threatened, the physical altercation between Johnny and Peter was enough proof, the past abuse another indicator of Johnny’s well-founded fear of imminent death. But as there was no weapon pointed at Johnny and Betsy at the time that Peter was killed, no gun on the floor, no bullets
, no gunpowder, no police reports of past abuse, no police reports of a murdered mother, it did not hold up well.

  Alfred said, again, in closing, that Betsy and Johnny were after his father’s money. He said Johnny had been traumatized by his mother’s disappearance when she left to be with her lover, that he had tried to falsely blame his father for killing her so he could get away with murder in this very courtroom.

  “He’s lying to save himself, save Betsy. He’s making up stories. He’s trying to confuse you. He doesn’t realize how smart you are, jury members, that you’ll see through this evil cha-rade.” Alfred pointed at Johnny and Betsy once again. It would make him click his heels together if that photo were on the front cover of the paper tomorrow! He was having a superb hair day, too. “Don’t be fools!”

  Betsy was painted as the manipulative, sly, sneaky young woman who tried to make it look like self-defense when it clearly wasn’t. Betsy’s premonitions made everything worse. The jury believed her to be delusional, or a liar, or a delusional liar. No one

  190 Cathy Lamb

  could see the future. Ridiculous. What a pathetic excuse. Plus, they believed that it was Betsy who held the knife.

  The only witness?

  Tilly Kandinsky. Johnny’s little sister. But she was only seven when it happened, and she was still not speaking. She was in foster care. She was traumatized. She was now an orphan.

  The jury was out for five days.

  In the end, they voted to convict Betsy and Johnny of first-degree murder.

  When Betsy and Johnny were pulled out of the courtroom after the jury verdict, he shouted at her, “I love you, Betsy,” and she said back, in a whisper, which is all she could say through her constricted throat. “I love you, too.”

  They were both moved from jail and transported to prison.

  Their nightmares began anew.

  The first night in her new prison cell, battling fear and grief, listening to bars clanging, a woman wailing, and a guard yelling, Betsy had the same premonition that had plagued her her whole life.

  She was on the same road. It was tight, narrow, curving. The sun behind her was slanting through the fir trees. The mountain was on the left, cliff on the right. Orange poppies were scattered here and there, like a floral blanket.

  Betsy saw her hands clutching the steering wheel. She looked over the edge of the cliff, to make sure she wasn’t too close, and then she saw the blue truck suddenly in front of her as it barreled around the curve. A woman was driving.

  She drew in a breath, then turned the wheel hard to the right and drove her car straight off the cliff. The car bounced down, glass smashing, metal clashing, the noise a screeching, splitting cacophony. She saw herself banging around in the car, her body thrust into the airbag. She felt the heat. She saw the flames. Was she going to burn to death? Was the car going to explode?

  ALL ABOUT EVIE 191

  Why did she turn her steering wheel and drive straight over the cliff? There was still ten feet at least between her and the oncoming blue truck.

  Did she die?

  It looked like it. Her head was out the window, hanging like a rag doll. She sensed someone coming down the cliff, rocks slipping. She heard a scream of alarm, then another scream from pain. Had the other woman fallen? Was she okay? Had she died?

  Betsy shivered.

  One of them dies, she thinks. She felt the black claw of death, but the death was murky, blurry, and deaths were never blurry in her other premonitions.

  Was it her? Was it the other woman?

  Who was the other woman?

  She pulled herself into a ball on her prison cot. She was cold, utterly depressed, and worried about her baby Rose. Was she healthy? Were her new parents kind and patient with her?

  But if the premonition was correct, if the accident happened, she is released from prison at some point in time in the future.

  She held on to that faintest glimmer of hope yet again.

  She did not sleep at all that night. Prison is never conducive toward sleep.

  Plus, her new roommate jumped her and beat her face up.

  In response to Johnny Kandinsky’s claim that his father had murdered his mother in Idaho, before they moved to Oregon, the police in Idaho searched the Kandinskys’ abandoned home up in the hills. They searched below the home in the crawl space, the barn, and an outbuilding. They saw no sign of a crime, no blood splatters, no body. They never moved beyond the immediate property to search the acreage that Peter Kandinsky owned.

  No one had ever claimed that Gabriella Kandinsky was missing. Plus, she was an illegal Mexican. She shouldn’t have been here in the first place, even if she did marry an American, right?

  She had never applied for citizenship. She had simply snuck into the country. In all likelihood she had moved back to Mexico

  192 Cathy Lamb

  with her lover and was working there. She went home, they said.

  There was no body, no signs of violence.

  And, again, she was illegal. . . .

  Case closed.

  C h a p t e r 1 9

  I saw Marco in town talking to a couple of other men. Both of the men were kind, friendly people. One was Zeb Lowry, who used to be a corporate manager at a huge shoe company and burned out. The other was a businessman who flew in and out of Seattle to the island.

  I ducked into my friend Callie’s shop. She sold women’s clothing. The shop is called Abracadabra Now You Will Be Pretty. It’s an odd name for a shop, but Callie says she has a grandmother who’s a witch and her mother thought her grandma might truly have witchly powers, so there it is. Abracadabra. Callie has bright red hair. She’s thirty-five.

  “Hiding from someone?” she called out, and I made a face at her. “Ahh.” She sighed when she looked out the window. “I totally get it. I’m thinking about getting animals so I can go and visit him. I don’t even like animals—they get all slobbery and dirty and they poop—but every time I see him I can’t talk. It’s like my tongue gets all swelled up and I can’t blink and my bladder gets a little wiggly.”

  “Your bladder gets wiggly?” That was bizarre.

  “Yes. I don’t know why.” She sighed again.

  “When your husband is around, you don’t get all wiggly if you see Marco, do you?”

  “I try not to. But you know Ziggy. The man’s blind.”

  “Only in one eye.”

  “He’s dense.” She shrugged. “All men are dense, aren’t they?

  194 Cathy Lamb

  It’s like they’ve got wood in their brains. They see what they want to see and ignore the rest. They ignore facts they don’t like or can’t comprehend. When I look at Marco and my toes curl in, I think bedroom thoughts. Hey!” She snapped her fingers.

  “While you’re hiding here, can you see my future?”

  “I can’t see the future.”

  She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I want to know if Ziggy will ever have an affair.”

  Ziggy loved Callie. I knew Callie loved Ziggy. I pretended to think about it. “No. Never.”

  She clapped her hands. “Yes! I knew it.” Her brow furrowed.

  “Will I?”

  I pretended to think again. “No. Never.”

  “Hmm!” She looked proud of herself and irritated at the same time. “Okay. Fine. But darn it, too. I was hoping for a quick romance on a girls vacation or something. One seductive Frenchman for a week.”

  “No, sorry. It’s not in your future.”

  “Can you tell me another future?”

  “No, I have to stick with the accurate ones. No affairs, no fun.”

  I snuck out the back of Callie’s, but I couldn’t continue to avoid Marco when he came into my bookstore looking all handsome and studly in jeans and a black T-shirt about an hour later.

  “Hi, Evie.”

  “Hi, Marco.” You literally take my breath away.

  “Can you help me find some more books? I read all the ones from last time.”

  �
�Wow. You’re a fast reader.”

  “You chose great books for me.”

  “What do you want to do with me?” Oh no. Oh no. “I mean, what book type, genres, do you want to be with?” What book did he want to be with? Must I speak in a carnal fashion?

  “Read. What books do you want to read?” I am a lovesick fool.

  He smiled, so gentle in that masculine face, scars here and there, and I smiled back and tried not to groan in a sexual way.

  First we found him three books. Then I asked him if he wanted to have coffee and a slice of six-layer mocha fudge chocolate cake

  ALL ABOUT EVIE 195

  with me. I was surprised at myself for that invitation. He seemed surprised, too, but pleased, and we had cake out on the deck and watched the boats sitting in the sun. We talked more, endlessly, easily, from one subject to the next, from animals to movies to the island to fun things we liked to do, until he said, “I have to go. I’ve got two horses and a sheep coming in to see me.”

  “You can’t be late for them. The horses will think you’re rude and the sheep will think you’re ill-mannered.”

  “I try not to be either.”

  He smiled and I smiled back, and I could feel that pull of him. I could feel the love I had for him. I could feel how irresistible he was.

  It stabbed me in the heart, that it did.

  I stared out the window from my upstairs office and watched Marco cross the street like the sappy love-fool that I am.

  My relationships with men in the past have all been shallow.

  Initially, in college, I went for the “bad boys,” but not for the usual reason: Bad boys are intriguing and sexy and rebellious.

  I assumed they would be fine if I broke up with them. They’d simply move on to another young woman. I also thought they would give me emotional space. They would not demand much from me. They wouldn’t want to get serious because they were