“The identity and current whereabouts of her birth parents.”
“You already know who they are or you wouldn’t be here. Go ahead and tell her, if you haven’t already. Tell her she’s the daughter of a low-life son of a bitch rapist and a poor, sick girl who should never have been born herself.”
Carolyn Everson said, “Netta.”
“Well, it’s the truth.”
“She’s long dead. Let her be.”
I said, “So you don’t want anything to do with her child.”
“That’s right,” Netta said. “Not a goddamn thing. She comes sucking around here, she’ll regret it.”
“I asked Ms. Everson, Netta, not you.”
“She’s nothing to me,” Carolyn Everson said. “Why should I want anything to do with her?”
“All right. I’ll tell her that. But I’d like to be able to tell her some other things, too—facts I don’t have yet.”
“Such as?”
“Who her father was.”
“I told you,” Netta said, “a low-life son of a bitch rapist.”
“His name—what was his name?”
“I won’t dirty my mouth with it.”
Carolyn Everson said, “Neither will I.”
“Tell me about Jody then.”
“What about Jody?”
“Did she name the child Melanie Ann?”
“No.”
“Something other than Melanie Ann?”
“No. She never saw it.”
“The Aldriches took the baby as soon as she was born?”
“Day after.”
“How did Jody die?”
Netta said, “That’s none of your business.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t like opening old wounds, but I think Melanie has a right to know that too.”
“Well I don’t.”
I took a breath before I asked, “Was she disturbed?”
“Disturbed?”
“Mentally or emotionally.”
Netta let go of Carolyn Everson, came up close to me—in my face with her nose about three inches from mine. “You bastard. Get the hell off this property, right now.”
“Look, I’m only trying to—”
“I don’t care what you’re trying to do. We’ve had enough of your crap.”
I moved sideways a step to look at Carolyn Everson. She hadn’t moved; the dead eyes stared right through me. Letting Netta handle the situation, as she probably let Netta handle most situations. Zombie and her keeper. No, that wasn’t fair. I didn’t know her and I didn’t know Netta, and I’d seen enough pain in my life to know better than to judge its victims.
“You want me to call the law?” Netta said.
“I’m going. Sorry to have troubled you both—I mean that.”
Netta, behind me as I went down the steps: “And don’t fucking come back.”
I wouldn’t. One more stop and maybe then I could leave Marlin’s Ferry for good.
IT TURNED OUT TO BE two more stops because Evan Yarnell wasn’t at his farm. An elderly woman who said she was his housekeeper told me he’d gone fishing. She didn’t want to tell me where, but I wheedled it out of her: his favorite spot on the river, a few miles from the farm near Camanche Reservoir.
I found it with no trouble, at the end of a dirt track that cut through somebody’s cattle graze. An old Jeep Wagoneer was parked in the shade of a cottonwood, and fifty yards beyond, where more cottonwoods and weeping willows lined the riverbank, I found Yarnell. He wasn’t alone. He and a white-haired man a few years his junior were seated in camp chairs on the grassy bank, lines trailing from bamboo poles into the sluggish brown water. A half-open ice chest loaded with bottles of Sierra Pale Ale rested between them.
They were not happy to see me. Nobody was happy to see me these days, it seemed, except for my bride. Yarnell’s hawk eyes raked over me as I cocked a hip against a bent tree limb at the river’s edge. “You don’t give up, do you?” he said.
“Stubborn, that’s me. Nice spot you’ve got here. Anything biting?”
“Just one big crappie, so far.”
I worked up a smile. “Warm day. You wouldn’t offer the big crappie one of those ales, I suppose.”
“You suppose right. Remind me of a fellow I knew in Oregon in the thirties, stringer for a Portland paper. Came around asking questions he had no business asking, annoying the hell out of everybody, then in the next breath he’d try to bum a cigarette or a drink. What do you think of a fellow like that?”
“I don’t know. What do you think of him?”
“Pain in the ass,” Yarnell said. “Royal variety.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well? What do you want this time?”
“Same thing as yesterday, only not as much of it.” I glanced at his silent companion. “Might be better if we talked in private.”
The white-haired man said, “You’ll talk to both of us,” in a scratchy baritone. “I’m Lyle Cousins.”
“Ah. We meet at last, Mr. Cousins.”
“I wish I could say it was a pleasure.”
I took a closer look at him. Thin and sallow and puckered, with a face that looked as though it had been soaked daily in lemon juice. He had a kind of sour dignity, though, even in fishing clothes. If you were casting an amateur production of A Christmas Carol and wanted a perfect type to play Ebenezer Scrooge, Cousins would be the man you’d choose.
Yarnell said, “You’re just wasting your time, you know. We’re not going to tell you anything.”
“I think you might.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I already know about the rape of Jody Everson and how Melanie Ann came to be adopted. I just talked to Carolyn Everson.”
Yarnell said, “Shit,” and knuckle-thumped his bald head the way he had yesterday. He glanced sideways at Cousins. “Told you he was a root-hog on the scent, didn’t I?”
Root-hog on the scent, big crappie, royal pain in the ass: insults at the old fishing hole. They didn’t bother me, though. From where he was sitting they were valid. A little, maybe, from where I was sitting too.
“If you know so much,” Cousins said to me, “why are you here?”
“To find out a few more details. I can get them elsewhere but that would mean staying around another day or two. I figure you want me gone as much as I want to be gone.”
“And then what? You report to the Aldrich girl and she comes here and stirs things up even more?”
“I don’t know yet that I’m going to give her a full report,” I said. “Even if I do, I doubt she’ll want anything to do with Carolyn Everson or Marlin’s Ferry.”
Yarnell spat into the grass at his feet. “Ugly damn story, isn’t it.”
“What I know of it, yes.”
“You pleased with yourself now you dug it out?”
“No.”
“Bet Carolyn wasn’t pleased either. She’s had a rough life, rougher than you can imagine. You surprised to find her with a woman like Netta Conrad? You did meet Netta, didn’t you?”
“I met her. And no, I wasn’t surprised.”
“Men have done Carolyn dirt all her life, pretty near every man she ever had anything to do with. You’re no different.”
“You don’t need to keep ragging on me, Ev,” I said. “I’m sorry now I bothered her. I wouldn’t talk to her at all if I had it to do over again.”
“Hindsight’s a great teacher,” Yarnell said.
“Isn’t it. But now that I’ve seen her, I’ll go back again if it’s the only way to finish my job. You and Mr. Cousins can keep that from happening.”
The lawyer said flatly, “We won’t answer any questions about the adoption. Nor will we answer questions that violate anyone’s legal rights in any way.”
“Fair enough. The first thing I want to know is the name of the boy who raped Jody Everson.”
Cousins didn’t give a hoot about the rapist’s rights. He said, “Chehalis. Stephen Chehalis.”
“Sp
ell the last name, please.”
He spelled it.
“Bad one, that boy,” Yarnell said. “Real young hardcase. In and out of trouble with the law, once over another girl that claimed he attacked her. Carolyn was a fool to take up with him.”
“Carolyn?”
“She was keeping company with him when it happened. He went to the Everson house one night and she made the mistake of leaving him there alone with Jody.”
“And he attacked Jody in her own home?”
“No. Not then and not there.” Yarnell paused to look at Cousins, asking tacit permission to continue; the lawyer nodded. “She led him on some, she admitted that afterward. Agreed to meet him the next night. That’s when he assaulted her, out on one of the orchard roads—Everson Orchards. He started mauling her, she scratched his face, and he hit her and choked her some and then raped her.”
“Hurt her pretty badly, I understand.”
“Badly enough. Farmworker found her not long afterward and she told him who’d done it. He alerted a bunch of other workers and they went after Chehalis at his folks’ place, held him there for the law.”
“Held him? According to the story I heard, they kicked hell out of him and nearly lynched him.”
“Now who told you a thing like that? There wasn’t any beating or near lynching, was there, Lyle?”
“No,” Cousins said, “of course not.”
“Then why was he injured?”
“Fell and broke his leg trying to run away.”
“Uh-huh. But Jody and her sister refused to press charges against him.”
“Carolyn felt it best to avoid the trauma of a trial.”
“And as family counsel, you agreed?”
“The decision wasn’t mine to make.”
“So you didn’t agree.”
“I would have preferred the boy be prosecuted, yes.”
“What happened to him after he got out of the hospital?”
“He left town.”
“With a police escort and a warning not to come back.”
Neither man responded.
“Any idea where he went?”
Yarnell shook his head. “Wherever it was, he was damn lucky to be there.”
“He ever come back?”
“Not that we know about.”
“What about his family? They leave too?”
“Not with him. I felt sorry for them, the mother especially. Decent enough people, except John Chehalis drank too much. Nobody’d have anything to do with them after the rape. And the head of Everson Orchards back then, Frank Leland, couldn’t see his way to keeping John on the payroll. Man couldn’t find a job anywhere else in the area, so he and his wife pulled up stakes too. Less than a month after the boy went.”
“So John Chehalis worked for the Everson family.”
“In charge of one of their orchards. Stephen worked for ’em, too, picking apples.”
“How old was Stephen at the time?”
“Carolyn’s age. Twenty-two.”
“And Jody was sixteen?”
“Seventeen when the child was born.”
“Any idea what became of John Chehalis?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. He had a brother lived in lone. The brother died a few years ago and willed his house to John. Must have been hard for him to move back as close to Marlin’s Ferry as twenty miles, but he did it.”
“Ione. Okay.”
“Going to open up the Chehalises’ old wounds too?”
I let that pass. “A few questions about Jody and I’ll be on my way.”
“What about Jody?”
“You said she led Stephen Chehalis on. Was she that kind of girl—a tease who tried to steal her sister’s boyfriends?”
Off-limits question: no answer. Yarnell reached into the ice chest for a bottle of ale, brushed off ice crystals, and popped the cap with an old-fashioned church key. He watched me as he drank slowly from the neck.
I said, “I was told she was disturbed in some way, mentally or emotionally. Is that true?”
There was a little more silence before Yarnell said, “No. She wasn’t disturbed. Not the way you mean.”
“What other way is there?”
“She couldn’t help the way she acted.”
“Why couldn’t she?”
No response.
I said, “She was in her twenties when she died. At least tell me the cause of her death.”
More silence. Insects droned in the sun-flecked shade; a fish made a soft plop under drooping willow branches not far away. I was about to try again, one last try, when Cousins belched sourly —a surprising sound, coming from him—and said, “Go ahead and tell him, Ev. It’s no secret and it’ll keep him from bothering anybody else in town.”
Yarnell said, “She had a brain tumor. That isn’t what she died of, though. Carolyn kept it from her as long as she could, but when Jody found out she killed herself. Swallowed a whole damn bottle of rat poison.”
IN THE CAR I THOUGHT: It just keeps getting worse and worse. Now I’ll have to tell Melanie at least part of it. Brain tumor . . . genetic tendency for something like that can be hereditary. She doesn’t have to know about the suicide, but she’s got to know about the tumor....
Camanche North Shore wasn’t far away; and it was in Amador County, which was also where Ione—a little town up near Jackson—was located. I drove to the marina store there and looked up John Chehalis in the county directory. He was listed: East Marlette Street, lone.
I had an impulse not to go looking for him and his son, to cut this off right here and now. But I couldn’t make myself give in to it. The big crappie royal pain in the ass root-hog on the scent always finishes what he starts. Always, no matter what.
Chapter Eight
IF YOU LIVE LONG ENOUGH, read and get around enough, you’re bound to accumulate a vast storehouse of trivial information. Some of it gets buried deep and is never resurrected. Some of it slides into your consciousness at odd times, for no particular reason. Felt making, not spinning or weaving, is the oldest of the textile crafts—that kind of thing. And some of it surfaces as a result of circumstance, occasionally amazing you because you have no memory of ever having picked it up in the first place. The original name of the town of lone, for instance.
Bedbug. Bedbug, California.
That little snippet popped into my head as I drove into the place on Highway 104. And it was followed by related snippets, one at a time, like links in a very old sausage. Bedbug. Later changed to Freezeout, which hadn’t been much of an improvement. Became lone when some semiliterate soul who had been reading Bulwer-Lytton persuaded his fellow citizens to name the village and valley after one of the ladies in The Last Days of Pompeii. Bulwer-Lytton and romantic notions in a hell-raising town that had been born as a cattle center supplying the mother-lode miners and first christened as a variety of vermin: history is stranger than fiction, all right. Which was probably the reason I’d retained all of this, although for the life of me I couldn’t remember where I’d first learned it.
lone, in the last decade of the twentieth century, was still a cattle and farming center with a population of a couple of thousand. It was also where Mule Creek State Prison was located, off Highway 104. Its three-block central district was lined with false fronts, tin roofs, faded DRINK COCA-COLA signs painted on brick walls, and a crumbling old hotel with rusty wrought-iron trim that now housed a dance theater and jazz club. A few of the side streets were unpaved, and there were a minimum of sidewalks. Except for the nearby presence of the correctional facility, it had the look and feel of a dusty, backcountry relic of simpler times.
I stopped the car on Main and hauled out the Amador County map I’d bought in Jackson. One of the street-plan insets was of lone, and it told me that East Marlette Street was a short distance from where I sat. I found it and the Chehalis house in three minutes.
The house was a small frame in need of paint, with an exposed foundation and a weed-dominated lawn. A pair
of big, leafy elm trees shaded the front porch. Two people, a man and a woman, were sitting on the porch—not doing anything else, not talking to each other, just sitting there watching the street. They didn’t move when I parked in front and they didn’t move when I walked along a cracked path to the porch steps.
“Mr. Chehalis? Mrs. Chehalis?”
It was the man who answered, but not until he’d looked me up and down. Washed-out brown eyes were the only part of him that stirred until he spoke. He was in his sixties, gaunt, sunken-cheeked, with tufts of gray-brown hair that sprouted from his scalp like dead weeds. Ruptured blood vessels in his face told the world what his major vice was. He’d lived a hard life, all right—an even harder life than Carolyn Everson—and so had the woman sitting beside him. She was roughly the same age, stringy hair cut short and dyed a freakish black, as if it had been done with shoe polish. She was big-boned and you could see that once she’d been fat; age and arthritis and Christ knew what else had slimmed and twisted her, leaving folds of loose flesh on her neck and bare, gnarled arms. The arthritic knobs on her wrists were as large as walnuts.
“If you’re selling something,” John Chehalis said, “you can turn right around and ride on out of here.” His chair made a scraping noise as he leaned forward. “We ain’t interested.”
“I’m not selling anything.”
“What you want then?”
“Personal matter. It won’t take more than a few minutes. Okay if I come up on the porch?”
“Tell me what you want first.”
“I’m trying to locate your son, Mr. Chehalis. I thought you—”
“Shit!” He came up out of his chair, wrapped both hands tight around the porch railing. His eyes bulged; so did the cords in his neck. “What’s he done now?”
“He hasn’t done anything. The reason I’m looking for him—”
“That rotten little shit,” he said. “Plagued me all my life. Ruined my goddamn life, cost me the only good job I ever had. Rotten piece of shit. I should’ve put a pillow over his face when he was in diapers.”
The woman looked stricken. “Johnny, don’t talk like that. He was wild, sure he was, but he growed up all right.”
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