Sonny grinned at Donnally as she walked away. “Nice try, pal, but it’s not her. She’s a divorcee from Boston just arrived to pursue the new age dream.”
“I thought metaphysics was all in your head and you could do it anyplace, even while serving clam chowder at Fenway Park.”
“Some people need the scenery.”
“Is that why Trudy is up here?”
“No. She’s so trapped inside herself. It doesn’t make any difference where she is.”
“Then why Mendocino County?”
Sonny glanced toward the waitress, who was handing the order form to the cook.
“She blends in.”
A fter dinner, Sonny led Donnally across the dark parking lot to the back of the Willys and lowered the rear gate.
“Let me see your cell phone,” Sonny said. “I need to make sure your GPS isn’t activated.”
Donnally removed it from his jeans pocket, punched his way through three levels of the menu, then showed the screen to Sonny.
Sonny nodded, then pointed back and forth between Donnally and the interior and said, “You’ll be riding back here.” He glanced around to see if anyone was watching them, and then reached inside and withdrew a ski mask with the eyeholes sewn closed.
“If you trust me to get you to Trudy,” Sonny said. “I’ll trust you to keep your head down and this covering it.”
Donnally lay down on the sleeping bag-covered bed and slipped on the mask. Moments after Sonny closed him in, he pulled out his gun and checked the safety. He was able to keep track of Sonny’s first few turns, then he was lost. He could tell the kind of roads they were on by the vibrations and the jolting, but not the direction or the distance.
Gravel ticking up from below and rattling against the undercarriage an hour later told Donnally that Sonny had turned off the pavement. The wagon bucked, bumped him into the air, and then slammed him down.
“Sorry, man,” Sonny said. “I didn’t see that one coming.”
A half hour of bouncing and jostling later, Sonny stopped. The abrupt end to the chaos of squeaking springs and shuddering metal made the silence seem hollow.
“You can take off the mask,” Sonny said, opening his door.
Donnally lowered the tailgate and climbed out into the night, grateful to be breathing mountain air instead of the Willys’s exhaust. He flinched at the light emerging from the first floor of the two-story log cabin, then heard footsteps behind him. He turned toward the soft crunch of boots on pine needles. The bearded man ignored Donnally and walked up to Sonny.
“You search him?” the man asked.
“Yeah, Bear. Before we left.”
Bear turned toward Donnally. “Raise your arms.”
The man patted down Donnally’s chest, sides, and the inside and outside of his legs, then nodded.
“He’s clean,” Bear said.
Sonny looked over at Donnally, eyebrows narrowed. Donnally hooked his thumbs over his belt buckle and patted the top of his zipper as if to say that amateurs are too squeamish to squeeze another guy’s crotch.
“See. I told you,” Sonny said.
Bear shrugged and pointed at the cabin door, then turned and walked off into the darkness.
“Bear?” Donnally said to Sonny. “These folks couldn’t come up with a nickname more original than Bear?”
Sonny grinned. “They’re strong believers in recycling.”
Donnally followed Sonny inside. A sixty-five-year-old woman sitting wrapped in an afghan next to the stone fireplace looked over and directed a weak smile at Sonny. She then gazed up at Donnally. Her face was as emaciated as Mauricio’s on the day he died. Pale, thin, and drawn. Eyes sunken. Gray-blond hair hanging long and frizzy. Bony fingers interlaced on her lap.
Donnally hesitated to approach her for fear she would disintegrate like a ghost in daylight.
Trudy gestured toward the rough-hewn pine couch to her right, facing the fire.
Donnally sat down while Sonny stoked the embers, and then picked up some chunks of oak and walked to the kitchen behind them. Donnally recognized the creak of the opening and closing doors of a wood-burning stove and the clang and scrape of a teapot on the cast-iron surface.
“I didn’t come here to ask you about Tsukamata,” Donnally told her. “I’m not trying to figure out why the cop was killed or who did it. I only want to know about Anna.”
Trudy gazed at Donnally. It struck him that there was a hardness and calculation behind her gaze that her appearance otherwise belied.
She had fugitive’s eyes.
“Sonny said that you found Rover and made the court convict him,” Trudy said.
Donnally shrugged. “Sort of.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you go looking for him in the first place?”
“I didn’t start out trying to find him, but Anna. Her brother asked me to.”
Trudy’s eyes widened as if it hadn’t crossed her mind since the day Anna was dropped off at New Sky that she had a birth family.
Donnally nodded. “Her brother.”
“Where is he?”
“Dead.” He anticipated her next question. “And her parents were already dead when he dropped her off at New Sky.”
“Why, after all these years…” Her voice trailed off into a sigh.
“He wanted to leave her something,” Donnally said, knowing that the implication was different than the fact. Mauricio intended to leave her not just money, but a lifetime of confusion.
“He didn’t know she’d been murdered?”
“Not a clue.”
Trudy stared at the fire. It crackled against the rumbling of Sonny’s water, near boiling in the kitchen.
“Why didn’t he look for her sooner?”
“There’d be too much to explain and he was on the run.”
“What did he do?”
Donnally shrugged. “That’s not important. He figured there were good people at New Sky who’d take care of her and not call the police.”
The teapot whistled, then fell silent when Sonny slid it to a cool part of the stove.
“It’s sad that he never knew what a wonderful person Anna grew up to be,” Trudy said.
“He saw her once outside of Berkeley High School. I think he knew you did a good job raising her.”
Trudy inspected Donnally’s face. He felt she was setting him up to confirm what she was about to say.
“I guess it’s finally over,” she said. “Now with Rover convicted.”
Donnally cringed. She sounded like a delusional relative of a murder victim, the sort who give press conferences talking about the closure they’d get if the killer was executed, as if the memories would die just because a murderer’s breath ceased.
But he didn’t say what he was thinking. He hadn’t come up there to attack Trudy’s self-deceptions.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Donnally let the thought linger for a moment, then said, “I’m not sure Brown did it.”
Trudy’s body pulled back. Her hand flew to her open mouth, but her eyes remained dull and fixed and emotionless. Donnally thought she looked like a second-rate actress playing herself in a third-rate production of her life. He didn’t want her to see his disgust, so he looked away. He felt like walking into the kitchen and shaking Sonny, make him wake up to the fraud she was and stop putting himself at risk protecting her.
She found her voice. “The police said-”
“They were wrong.”
Donnally pushed himself to his feet and stepped to the fireplace. He wasn’t sure what to say next. He was relying on a delusional man to guide him to the truth, and he didn’t yet know what she was hiding.
“Then who did it?” she asked.
He turned back toward her.
“Who is R2D2?”
Metal crashed against metal in the kitchen as Sonny slammed the teapot down on the stove.
“You son of a bitch,” Sonny yelled as he charged into the living room. “I didn’t bring you up here to talk about Tsukamata.”
Sonny stopped next to Trudy’s chair and jabbed a finger down at her. “Don’t answer him.”
Trudy looked up at Sonny. “The police already know who they are. What difference does it make if he does?”