“They?” Donnally said.
“It’s not R2D2,” Trudy said, “but R2T2. Two brothers who lived at New Sky in 1975. Artie and Robert Trueblood.”
“They’re who the police think killed Tsukamata?” Donnally asked.
They both nodded.
“And the police want to get to them through you?”
“That’s what they’ve been trying to do since 1975,” Trudy said, then closed her eyes. Her shoulders slumped as if the effort of disclosing the pivotal truth in her life had depleted her.
Sonny stepped forward like a referee and held out his arms as if separating them.
“That’s enough,” Sonny said. “We’re getting into accessory-to-murder territory.”
Sonny looked back and forth between them until Donnally shrugged his consent.
“This has all been too much of a burden on her,” Sonny said to Donnally as he reached out and rested his hand on her shoulder. “She’s been sick for decades.” He glanced toward the doorway. “Bear and the others look after her.”
Donnally sat back down on the couch.
“Sometimes my muscles and bones ache so much I can’t move. If I do housework, even for an hour, it takes a week in bed before I can do anything else.”
Trudy reached up and laid her hand on top of Sonny’s.
“It’s like I have arthritis all over my body and I can’t move without excruciating pain.”
“Maybe we should finish talking in the morning,” Sonny said, looking first at Trudy, then at Donnally. “About everything but R2T2. They’re off-limits.”
Sonny escorted Trudy down the hallway to her bedroom and returned with some blankets for Donnally.
“There’s one thing you need to understand about Trudy,” Sonny told him. “She carries the weight of the world on her shoulders, that’s what makes her sick. It’s like she has the consciences of ten people. It paralyzes her.”
Donnally accepted the blankets from Sonny’s hands, then said, “I think it’s just the opposite. It frees her to do and believe pretty much anything she finds convenient.”
“How do you figure?”
“One person’s conscience prevents him from lying, stealing, or torturing, another’s insists that he do them all, as long as he can justify the goal.”
Sonny stared at Donnally for a moment, then said, “Jeez. That’s kind of a mind spinner. I never looked at it that way before.”
Chapter 33
I n the dawn light, Donnally surveyed the living room from where he lay on the couch.
Crocheted pillows lay on all the chairs. Embroidered cloth on the tables. Quilts with American Indian motifs hung on the walls along with paintings in a dozen styles. One of them was of the New Sky Commune. Carvings of bears, wolves, and salmon stood on shelves and in bookcases.
Donnally slipped outside. The forest was silent except for the croaking of two ravens on the peak of the A-frame roof. The second floor windows were shuttered. He realized that he’d heard no sounds emanating from upstairs since he arrived: no footsteps, no voices, no flushing toilet. Holding his breath, he listened for road traffic or jet noise or even the buzz of high-voltage wires. Nothing.
He looked up at the blue sky, and then at an outbuilding to the northwest and at a barn to the north, imagining how the house and the two structures would look from a low-flying plane. The three buildings formed a triangle, twenty yards across the clearing from point to point. He surveyed the rest of the property. A long dirt driveway entered from the west and dead-ended at the house. A ten-year-old Ford pickup was parked next to the front steps. He memorized the license plate.
Trudy wasn’t as far off the grid as Donnally had first imagined, for an electric power line emerged from the forest and connected to the southeast corner of the house, just below a satellite dish.
Donnally looked around for Bear, then walked past Sonny’s Willys to the barn. A heavy lock barred the door, but through the slats he could make out the contours of a thirty-year-old water truck with a twelve-foot-long tank and a gasoline-powered generator.
B y the time Trudy and Sonny emerged from the hallway next to the kitchen, Donnally had the table set and pancakes cooked.
“Smells wonderful,” Trudy said, as she sat down. She was dressed in Levi’s and an oversized Pendleton wool shirt, not looking as pale as the night before.
“Secret ingredient,” Donnally answered.
“Can’t be secret.” She smiled. “I know everything that’s in the kitchen.”
Sonny sniffed the air. “Nutmeg. Got to be.”
Donnally shifted the pancakes onto plates and carried them to a dining table that separated the kitchen from the living room. He watched them spread homemade blackberry jam and begin eating. Both were nodding within seconds.
“You’ve got lots of beautiful things here,” Donnally said, glancing around the living room, then sitting down.
Trudy smiled with pride. “I made most of them myself. I sell them at the flea market in Fort Bragg.”
“Not herself,” Sonny said. “Bear and some of the others run the booth.”
The comment returned them to the previous night’s conversation. Trudy’s smile faded.
Donnally wanted to ease back to where he’d left off, but recognized that anywhere he began might provoke another one of Sonny’s outbursts. He stirred sugar into his coffee before he said, “Did Anna know a psychiatrist named William Sherwyn?”
Trudy set down her fork. “Why do you ask that?”
“Something Rover told me.”
“What did he say?”
“That Anna called Sherwyn a rabbit.”
“Not a rabbit,” Sonny said. “Just Rabbit. That was his nickname at New Sky.”
Donnally felt a jolt. “Sherwyn was at New Sky?”
“Only for a few months in the late seventies,” Sonny said. “The son of a bitch.” He looked over at Trudy. “You want to tell him or should I?”
She lowered her eyes.
“The problem with being outside the system,” Sonny said, “is that as a matter of principle you can’t use it even when you really need to.”
“Which means?”
“We caught him molesting one of the kids. But instead of hauling him down to the police station, we kicked him out.”
Donnally dropped his hands to the table with a thunk.
“You did what?”
“Don’t give me grief, Donnally. The principle that allowed us to help Anna’s brother by taking her in is the same one that kept us from going to the police.”
“Letting a child molester walk away was a matter of principle?”
Sonny smirked. “Don’t say it like that. You’re the guy who took a dollar to create attorney-client privilege. Is that principle any different? Even if I told you I murdered somebody, you couldn’t turn me in.”
Donnally now had another reason to wish he hadn’t taken the money, but he wasn’t going to argue about consistency. The answers he wanted from Trudy weren’t philosophical.
“If Anna said to Sherwyn, ‘I know who you are,’ ” Donnally asked Trudy, “is that what she meant?”
“Did Rover tell you that?”
“He said you heard her say it, too.”
In her hesitation and her twitching eyelids, Donnally got his answer. She was there, in the house with Anna and Sherwyn and Brown. He pushed on before she could lie.
“I’m thinking that Anna wanted to expose Sherwyn, but he threatened that if she did, he’d snitch you off about R2T2 and Tsukamata.”
Trudy bit her lower lip, then nodded.
“It was a stalemate,” Donnally continued. “Neither of them could do anything.”
Sonny cut in. “And Anna wasn’t about to embarrass the ex-New Sky people. A lot of them had moved away and gone straight. College professors, lawyers, shop owners. They all had a secret that made them feel dirty and would’ve made them look dirtier.”
“Which? About the molestation or the murder?”
Donnally couldn’t suppress the sarcasm in his voice.
“The molestation. The murder had nothing to do with New Sky. R2T2 were just hiding out there. They were Black Guerilla Family members on the run from an armored car robbery in New Jersey.”