Chapter 45
Kara Drummond said, “My treat.”
I put my money away.
We took our coffees to the same table, at the same Starbucks, in the same Richmond shopping center. She still worked next door at the bank, though she’d recently been promoted to manager. The added responsibility, on top of a bi-weekly drive to Reno, had begun to wear her down. Since February, she’d put an extra seven thousand miles on her car.
She gave me the latest from the lawyers handling her brother’s application for pardon. “The girlfriend whose name you gave them, they heard from her.”
She was referring to Francie Nguyen, one of Nicholas Linstad’s former paramours. I’d tried repeatedly to get in touch with her, but she had failed to return my calls, and I’d passed along her contact information more as an afterthought.
Now she’d changed her mind, following the appearance of a news item about the appeal. As expected, Nicholas Linstad’s father had declined to provide a DNA sample, and there was no legal means to compel him to do so. Nguyen had read the article on Berkeleyside and promptly called the Institute for Wrongful Convictions.
“She filed a paternity suit against him,” Kara said. “The court made him take a test. She has the whole profile.”
“How long till they get the comparison with the hairs back?”
“End of the week,” she said, crossing her fingers.
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Thank you,” Kara said, beaming. She was thrilled, and I was thrilled for her. At the same time, a tiny part of me felt shaken. I wondered if Francie Nguyen realized how fortunate she was to still be alive.
The other big news was that, after endless cajoling, Julian had agreed to come down and meet with his legal team in person.
“About time,” I said. “What’s on the agenda?”
“Antonio and Sarah” — the lawyers. “After that? Depends on how much time we have. We’ll visit who we can. I told him he could stay over with me. I said I’d give him the bed, Wayne can take the sofa.” She laughed. “I sleep in the bathtub.”
She paused. “He didn’t want to. He said he has to get back. It’s hard for him, being here. He gets nervous.”
“Bad memories,” I said.
She nodded.
I said, “Does your mom know he’s coming?”
“I didn’t tell her.” She toyed with the lid of her coffee cup. “You’re right, though. It’s up to him if he wants to have a relationship with her. I need to start thinking of him that way. You know? A person who can make his own decisions.”
I asked when they got in.
“Thursday,” she said.
“Send them my best.”
“I will,” she said. Then: “You have any time? In case Julian wants to see you.”
A beat.
I said, “I’m working.”
Her face loosened, settling in a half smile. “Sure.”
“I’ll see if I can get away.”
“Don’t worry if you can’t,” she said. “You’ve done enough. More than enough.”
Before returning to work, she needed to grab something from her car. I walked her across the softened asphalt and stood by in the broiling heat while she rummaged in the glove compartment. When she came up, holding a tube of hand cream, her necklace had fallen free of her blouse. The wooden sunflower.
She touched it. “Last time I went up, I had him fix the chain on.”
“It looks nice,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“I’ll let you know about Thursday.”
She tucked the necklace away; shut the car and locked it.
Hesitating, she stepped forward and embraced me.
It lasted a second or two. She pulled away with a short, embarrassed laugh, shaking her head, wiping her eyes. She started to speak, but thought better of it, leaving me alone in the punishing glare.
Chapter 46
I pulled to the curb, tapped the horn. The front door opened, and Paul Sandek came down the walkway. I lowered the passenger window to return his greeting.
“She said to tell you she’ll be out in a sec,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Realistically, though, it could be hours.” He leaned in through the open window. “We probably have enough time for PIG.”
I pointed: behind him, Amy had stepped from the house.
“Dammit,” he said.
She was toting a paper grocery bag — “Snacks,” she said — which she stashed in the footwell before sliding in next to me.
“Drive safely,” Sandek said.
“We will,” Amy said.
“As for you,” he said to me, “consider yourself lucky.”
“I do,” I said.
I couldn’t pretend to be familiar with the route, so I had Amy navigate. Google Maps predicted a drive time of two hours and fifty-eight minutes.
We spent the better part of that discussing her, which was fine by me. I wasn’t in a talkative mood, and anyway she had more news to share. A complete draft of her dissertation. A job lined up at the VA clinic in downtown San Francisco. Aside from seeing individual clients, she was to lead the weekly stress reduction group.
“I’m sure I’ll be burnt out soon enough,” she said. “But for right now I’m choosing to be excited.”
The question remained: hunt for an apartment in the city or remain in the East Bay? Convenience or affordability?
“I could probably swing a one-bedroom in the Tenderloin,” she said. “Either that, or I’m going to have to split with five other people. I feel like I’m getting a little old to be labeling my cottage cheese.”
“You could always stay at your parents’,” I said.
“That’s super-helpful, thanks.”
“Laundry service,” I said. “Free food.”
“Unwanted advice. Personal questions.”
“Learn to focus on the positives.”
“You think it’s so great,” she said, “I’m sure they’d be happy to have you.”
She pulled the snack bag onto her lap. “I have egg salad and turkey with Swiss. Oh — but. My mom really wanted you to have this for some reason.”
She unwrapped the sandwich to its waist. Meatloaf.
I laughed and took it.
The route was a straight shot down I-5, offering precious little scenery: monotonous stretches of wrinkled highway, beige hills relieved by farmland. Billboards advertised berries, fudge, antiques — always, it seemed, a bit farther on, a promise infinitely receding.
“In two miles,” the phone said, “the exit is on the right.”
“How’re you feeling?” Amy asked.
I shrugged. “Fine,” I said. “Little nervous.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“That would be the healthy thing to do, wouldn’t it.”
“Only if you want to,” she said.
“I don’t really.”
“Then don’t.”
A green sign loomed.
The phone said, “In one mile—”
Amy muted it.
The last stretch before the exit consisted of citrus groves — row after row of round-topped trees, studded with underripe fruit. It was easy to pretend we were headed someplace fun. A day of U-pick, followed by lunch, a nap, a blanket in the shade.
Then we crossed over a dry riverbed and the terrain sank and withered, becoming a terrible blankness, baked and sterile, only the sandy margins of the road and drooping power lines separating us from oblivion.
It was a vision of hell.
I reached for Amy, and she took my hand.
The prison campus revealed itself in stages. Barbed wire, protecting nothing but empty acreage; bleached green transformer boxes and orange traffic delineators and a duo of blinking amber lights that warned of the upcoming intersection. Low-slung cement structures: a sister facility: state hospital for mentally ill and sexually violent offenders.