No One You Know (25 page)

Thirty-six

Y
OUR BROTHER’S STAGE NAME WAS
B
ILLY,
wasn’t it?” I asked.

Frank was standing by the fireplace. Beside him, a pile of firewood rested in a copper bucket. “Yes, his band decided Billy Boudreaux sounded cooler than William. But to me, he was always Will. I remember once, before all the trouble started, we were in downtown Petaluma, having dinner at a little Italian restaurant, and some kid came up to him and said, ‘Hey, you’re Billy Boudreaux.’ Will autographed the kid’s schoolbook, and that was when I realized that he was living this double life. To me, he was just my kid brother, the same one who’d made miserable grades in school, the guy who could never manage to keep more than fifty bucks in the bank, but to some people he was this up-and-coming rock star. I figured you’d have to be a certain kind of person to be able to pull that off, to keep those two identities separate. One night he’d be standing in front of hundreds of screaming fans, and the next night he’d be eating Campbell’s soup for dinner in his crummy studio apartment in the Tenderloin.”

“You said he showed up at your door early one morning about a month after you kicked him out,” I said. “What happened?”

Frank came over. There were plenty of chairs, but he sat beside me on the edge of the couch, his body facing me. He was a big, sad-looking man. Out in the field with Dorothy, he had seemed cheerful, easygoing, but now that we were so close, our knees nearly touching, I understood that he exuded the kind of sadness that takes the air out of a room. I wondered what it would be like to be married to such a man, to wake up each morning with that sadness in the bed beside you, to kiss his sad mouth and hear his sad voice saying your name.

“I guess I never really did figure out what I was going to say to you when you showed up,” Frank said. “I mean, I pictured us right here in this room dozens of times, or in the kitchen, or out on the porch, and I tried to plan it out, the way I’d tell you what I know, but I never could get it right.”

I still couldn’t fathom how all of it fit together. I didn’t understand how his abandoning his brother at a hotel near the beach had led to what, I was sure, would be the story I’d been waiting to hear, in one way or another, for twenty years.

“He looked distraught,” Frank said. “He was crying. My first thought was that he’d gone off the wagon in a big way. But I’d seen him on a bender too many times to count, and I’d never seen anything like this. Nancy and Tally were in Arizona with Nancy’s parents, so I didn’t have to worry about them, but I was still nervous about letting him in. I guess I was actually afraid of him right then, which was something I’d never felt before, not on his worst days.

“I turned on the porch light and stepped outside. His car was idling in the driveway. I told him to go turn it off, and he did. That’s when I noticed the car was all scratched up, mud on the wheels, dead insects on the windows. If there was one thing in the world he took care of, it was that car. God knows why. It was a sad excuse for a car, an old white Chevrolet, but for some reason he loved it. I think it might have had to do with the fact that he could never really keep an apartment for long, so that car was more like his home than anywhere else. Even during his worst episodes, he somehow managed to hose off the car and keep the windows clean. But not that night.

“When he came back up on the porch I asked him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me. He just said he was in some trouble, and he needed a shower and a place to sleep. ‘I’m clean,’ he said. ‘Haven’t done shit since you kicked me out.’ I’m not sure what it was—maybe something in his eyes, maybe his tone of voice—but I believed him. What was scary was that I knew whatever he’d gotten himself into this time was a whole lot worse than drugs. But then, I guess what it all comes down to in the end is blood. He was my brother. I just couldn’t turn him away.

“After he showered, I gave him clean clothes and cooked us some eggs and bacon. He ate like he hadn’t eaten in days, must have drunk four or five glasses of milk. I tried to get him to tell me what was going on, but he just totally clammed up. All he would say was that he’d done something terrible, and it was an accident, and he didn’t know what to do or where to go. I guess if he’d been anyone other than my brother, I would have called the police. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. For some reason, I was remembering this time when we were kids—he was seven, I was sixteen—and I’d been walking home from school along this wooded road, and I’d heard something in the bushes, some kids laughing, and I went in there to investigate. It was a couple of boys from the fourth grade class, and they had Will shoved up against a tree, and they were pissing on his shoes, these brand-new sneakers, white with red stripes, that he was so proud of. Even though Will was big for his age, they were three grades ahead of him, and he just looked so helpless there, and terrified, trying his best not to cry. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes when he saw me, this look of pure and absolute trust. I just lost it, I let them have it. A few minutes later those boys stumbled away crying, with bloody lips and black eyes, and nobody ever messed with Will again. And that’s what I was thinking about when Will sat in this house that night, eating his bacon and eggs. I was thinking that he was my responsibility.

“By the time Nancy got home a few days later, Will was clean-shaven and sober and as polite as could be. She let him stay. We never had any problems with him after that. He worked the farm, took care of Tally. By then the girl who’d bought Dorothy from your sister had moved on and left Dorothy with us. Will took care of her like she was his own horse he’d raised from a foal. He never rode her, but he cleaned out her stall every day, fed her, groomed her, walked with her down to the stream where she liked to drink. I’d never seen anybody so devoted to a horse. A few weeks after he moved back in with us, we were all eating dinner together when Nancy wondered out loud what ever had happened to that sweet girl who brought Dorothy out here. Nancy and I were trying to think of her name, and we both had it just on the tip of the tongue, when Will said, very quietly, ‘Lila.’ We hadn’t even started eating yet, but Will said that he felt sick and he needed to go up to his room.

“Later that night Nancy went to check on him, but he wouldn’t open the door, and he didn’t come out of his room for the next couple of days. I look back on it now and think it’s kind of strange we didn’t know that she’d been killed. I mean, later, when I went back to look at the newspapers from that time, I saw it had been all over the place. All I can figure is that we were so wrapped up with the farm, struggling, trying to make it work, trying to figure out how to be parents, that we just weren’t paying attention to the news or to anything that was happening outside our own little world.

“Anyway, your sister’s name didn’t come up again until six years ago. Nancy and Tally were asleep. I was sitting in this room, over there by the fireplace, just enjoying the sound of the fire, when I heard footsteps on the stairs. Will must not have seen me, because if he had, there’s no way he would have done what he did next.”

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I wanted to press pause, somehow prepare myself. I realized the story was about to change irrevocably. Moments from now, Thorpe’s book, the book that had provided the only map I knew of Lila’s last days, would be rendered obsolete. After eighteen years of defining the story for me, Thorpe’s book would no longer hold sway. It was strange—Thorpe’s story seemed so much more alive, more persuasive, every fact and supposition backed up by more facts, each sentence working so hard to convince the reader that it was all real, that it had all really happened. And yet, somehow, I knew this new story, so different, so simple and plain, was the real truth.

I leaned forward. I wanted to know, and I didn’t. It was the same way I used to feel as a young girl when, after dinner, Lila and I would climb into our father’s lap, and he would tell us the tale of the golden arm. “Give me back my golden arm,” he would say in a deep, wavering voice, while Lila and I squealed in terrified delight, waiting for the inevitable moment when he would raise his hands into the air like claws and grab each one of us by the arm and shriek, “Gotcha!” I used to think it was our father’s favorite ghost story, but when I was older he confessed to me it was the only one he knew.

“He went over to that desk right there”—Frank pointed to an antique oak secretary—“took a key ring out of his pocket, and opened a series of smaller and smaller compartments until he got to the one he was looking for. Other than the car, that secretary was his only significant possession. Our great-aunt left it to him when he was just a kid, and after we left home and my parents sold their house, he didn’t have anywhere to put it, so I kept it for him. But he’d always been the one with the key, and over the years, while Will was out living his life, I liked having this piece of him nearby, it helped me feel close to him. I didn’t know exactly what he had in it, but every now and then over the years I’d see him open it up and put something in one of the compartments—a newspaper clipping about his band, a ticket stub, a photograph.

“I don’t know why I sat there in silence that night when he came into the room—I was going to say something, and then I saw him pull out the key—and I don’t know, I guess, in a way, I must have wanted to be let in on his secret, whatever it was. He pulled something out, then closed the drawer back, and I must have made a sound, because he turned around, startled.

“At that point I flipped on the light switch, and I was about to make some joke about him sneaking around in the middle of the night when I saw that he was holding a necklace.”

“What kind of necklace?” I asked, but I already knew.

Frank got up and went over to the mantel. He opened a little hen-shaped jadeite dish, took out a small skeleton key, and went over to the secretary. Then he did what Will must have done on that night six years before. He slid open the rolltop lid and began opening the compartments one by one, like a Chinese puzzle. Finally he came to a tiny compartment, buried so deep in the desk that I had to marvel at the ingenuity of the carpenter who made it. He slid two fingers into the drawer and pulled something out. His hand covered it so that I couldn’t see, and he came over to me. I held out my palm, and when he opened his fist it slid into my hand, as cool as if it had been buried deep in the earth. It was Lila’s gold chain with the topaz pendant, the necklace I’d given to her for her eighteenth birthday.

I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t breathe.

“Her necklace is missing,” my father had said, that day when he called me from the morgue in Guerneville to tell me that he had identified my sister’s body. Sitting in Frank’s living room, holding Lila’s necklace up to the light, I remembered how I had felt that day, as I held the phone to my ear and listened to my father’s monotone delivery. What I remembered was this: while I wasn’t quite able to process, during that brief phone call, the fact of my sister’s death, I had felt, quite clearly, a burning sense of injustice and disgust at the thought of someone stealing her necklace. It was just a cheap trinket, purchased with babysitting money, but she had loved it enough to wear it every day. For Lila, its value had nothing to do with the object itself, everything to do with her love for me.

Twenty years of my life had been defined by the loss of my sister, the person I had loved most in the world. But now I allowed myself to remember that she had loved me, too, absolutely and unconditionally. The secrecy of her final months, her reluctance to tell me the truth about Peter McConnell, did nothing to change that fact. It occurred to me then that she would have told me about McConnell, she would have told me about the whole affair—eventually, I knew, she would have—it was simply a part of the story that she hadn’t gotten to yet.

I was stuck inside the moment, unable to speak or even cry. There was shock, but there was also an enormous sense of relief at having the necklace in my possession. It was a piece of my sister’s story, a piece of my own.

Thirty-seven

A
FTER THAT, THE FACTS
I
’D BEEN WAITING
to hear for twenty years came out in a breathless rush.

“I didn’t even have to question him,” Frank said. “Will just started talking, without provocation. ‘It was an accident,’ he kept saying, and I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘What was an accident?’ I asked, and he said, ‘I cared about her, I never would have hurt her.’

“‘Who?’ I asked. That’s when he said her full name, for the first and only time, ‘Lila Enderlin.’”

This was what it came down to. The man who had helped me and Lila start our car all those years ago, the one I’d thought of as an interesting diversion on the farm, the one who didn’t even merit a brief mention in Thorpe’s book—it all, somehow, came back to him.

“Remember how I’d put him up in the hotel out by the beach after Nancy kicked him out?”

I nodded. I was clutching the necklace, and I could feel the pendant digging into my palm.

“Well, he never did get a job. He actually tried, but no one would hire him. He went through all the money I gave him, and then he had nowhere to stay, so he started living in his car. To make money for food and gas, he’d sing and play his guitar. He’d found that the best time was at night when people were going home from the bars. He’d go down into the Muni station, hop the turnstile to get to the westbound platform, lay his guitar case out on the ground, and start playing. Folks would be drunk, waiting around for the train, and they’d get generous when they heard him. I mean, he was good. He knew how to connect with people. He could pull in twenty, thirty bucks on a good night, enough for food, gas to get around town, a matinee every now and then, but it wasn’t enough to get a hotel room, not a decent one anyway. He was trying to steer clear of those dumps in the Tenderloin, because he knew how easy it was to get sucked back into the drugs again, and he was really trying to stay clean. And he was also trying to save a little money, so he could rent a studio and record some new songs.

“He told me he was doing it for Tally. He wanted to stay clean for three months. If he could do it for that long, out there on his own, he believed he could stay clean forever. After three months he’d come back to the farm and prove to me that he’d changed, that he could be a proper uncle.

“So one night he’s down there in the Muni station, about to pack up to go, singing his last song for the night, a Tim Hardin tune, ‘Reason to Believe,’ when he sees this good-looking woman down the track, walking toward him. And as she gets closer he realizes who it is. I’d always loved that song, ‘Reason to Believe.’ But now every time I hear it, it reminds me of Will’s story.

“At first he keeps his head down, hoping she won’t recognize him, because he’s embarrassed for her to see him like that. But she comes over, and she gets close so she can see his face, you know, and she listens to him for a few seconds before she finally says, ‘William, is that you?’”

Frank had the simplest way of telling a story, no big embellishments, no dramatic pauses or hand gestures, but as he spoke I could see Lila, in her green corduroy skirt, her black Converse high-tops and peacoat, walking up to her old acquaintance, tilting her head slightly, moving closer to get a better look. And I could hear her, “William, is that you?”—the kindness that would have been in her voice, and the concern, and the complete lack of judgment.

“It’s your sister, of course,” Frank said. “And once he gets over the embarrassment, he realizes that he’s really happy to see her. She’s just come from dinner and is on her way home, she seems upset, but he doesn’t want to pry, so he doesn’t ask what’s bothering her. They make small talk for a couple of minutes, and finally she asks if he’s doing all right. The way she asks, he can tell that she knows he isn’t really okay, but he tries to play it off, just a short run of bad luck, he says.

“At some point she looked up at the kiosk. There’d been an accident in the Montgomery Street Station, and it was going to be another half hour at least before her train arrived. Will offered to wait down there with her until the train came, because the station can get pretty dodgy at night, but she said she didn’t want to put him out. That’s when he told her that his car was parked just a half-block away, and he offered to give her a ride home. She said she’d be fine, but he insisted it was no trouble.”

As I listened to Frank’s story, I felt the way you feel when you’re watching a scary movie and the heroine goes into the dark house. The script has already been written, the movie’s already been made, but that doesn’t keep you from talking to the person on screen.
Don’t go,
I was saying in my mind.
Don’t go.
But of course I knew she’d already gotten in the car. There was no way to rewrite the script, no way to rewind the film.

“They were driving up Market when Will remembered your family’s cabin at the Russian River. He and Lila had talked about it back when she was keeping Dorothy on the farm. Once, she’d even shown him a picture of the place. He was really desperate for a shower, a quiet place to stay and sort things out. And so he just asked her, point-blank, if he could stay there. And she thought about it for a minute, she seemed to be considering it, but she said she couldn’t give him permission to do that. It was her parents’ house, not hers, and she knew they wouldn’t be okay with it.

“And this is where things got rocky. I mean, I keep telling you what a good guy Will was, and still in my heart I believe in his basic goodness, but there was this other part of him, this, I don’t know how to say it, this brashness. Where he’d get an idea in his head and he just wouldn’t let go of it, and if you threw an obstacle in his way, it made him all the more determined to get what he wanted. Sometimes it was a great character trait—it’s a big part of what made his band successful for a while there, without a doubt. But sometimes it could be scary. If he got hold of any idea that was, to him, perfectly rational, and somebody shot him down, he was capable of losing all sense of reason. And I know that’s what happened that night. His brain just checked out.”

“Why did she accept the ride?” I said. “She hadn’t seen your brother in years. Why didn’t she call me? I would have come to pick her up. It was a Wednesday, and Wednesday was my day to get the car. If I’d just let her have the car that morning—”

Frank reached over as if to touch my shoulder, but then he pulled his hand back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you sure you want to hear this right now? I can wait as long as you need.”

“It’s okay. Go ahead.”

“Will wouldn’t take no for an answer. At some point your sister noticed that they’d taken a wrong turn—but when she told him, he just kept driving. By the time they got to the Golden Gate Bridge, she knew where they were headed. She demanded that he turn the car around, but he wouldn’t. He apologized, promised he wasn’t going to hurt her. He just needed to get to the cabin, he told her—by then, he’d decided it was the answer to his problems. And when they arrived, she could let him in. It was very important to him, see, that she let him in. He wanted to enter the house the proper way, like an invited guest.

“I’ve gone over it hundreds of times and it doesn’t make any sense at all. I asked him, point-blank, what his plan was once he got to the cabin—was he going to hold this poor girl captive?—and he said he hadn’t thought that far ahead. He was angry with me for even suggesting it. ‘I’m not a kidnapper,’ he said. When I told him that yes, that’s exactly what he was, he started crying, saying none of it went the way it was supposed to, that it was all fucked up.

“He genuinely believed that while they were driving, he’d be able to appeal to her compassion, he’d be able to convince her to let him stay there, just for a week or two. He was certain he could find some sort of manual labor at Guerneville, and as soon as he got a paycheck he’d rent a place, because it was so much cheaper there than the city. He’d do work around the cabin, too, to earn his keep. He was telling her all of these things, and she just kept saying no, begging him to take her back home. But he kept driving.”

I was thinking about that drive over the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of the night, how when we were kids, Lila and I would huddle in the backseat while the car bumped over the bridge, and we’d gaze out in amazement at the fog, which looked ghostlike in the glow of the bridge lights. We usually left for the river on Friday nights, and the last half hour of the drive along dark, winding roads had always scared me. I had this feeling that something might leap out of the redwoods into our path—a deer, or the boogeyman—but Lila always tried to assuage my fear by telling me that deer avoided headlights and the boogeyman was just a stock character in scary movies.

“While he drove,” Frank continued, “Lila was getting more and more nervous. She started yelling at him, demanding that he stop the car and let her out, but he wouldn’t. She became frantic, and he kept telling her to calm down. Finally, on a wooded stretch of two-lane road just past Korbel, she jumped out of the car.

“Will said it happened so fast, he couldn’t stop her. He immediately pulled off to the side of the road and ran down the embankment, and found her lying there, not moving. He realized how stupid his plan had been, what a huge mistake he’d made. ‘She had no reason to be afraid of me,’ Will told me, which just shows how full of holes his brain was by then, maybe from all the drugs, I don’t know. I mean, he knew he wasn’t going to hurt her, and he expected her to understand that, too.”

And I was thinking about Lila, rational Lila. How she would have weighed her options as she sat in the car with her captor. How she would have calculated her chances of surviving a fall and running away, weighed them against what might happen if she didn’t. A couple of hours before, she’d been having dinner with Peter McConnell, wrapped up in the drama of their affair—thinking, perhaps, that she couldn’t stand what was happening to her, couldn’t deal with the fact that she had fallen in love with a married man. And then, she had to recalibrate everything. Maybe, as she sat captive in the car with William, she wished that she could go back to the mundane drama of the affair. Or maybe she made a decision about what she would do if she made it back home okay—maybe she decided to break it off with McConnell, start clean. Maybe she was thinking about the Goldbach Conjecture, the problem she still had to solve, the proof she was determined to find. And then she jumped. In a way, it made perfect sense. Lila, after all, was a person of action. For her, sitting back to see what happened, granting someone else control over her fate, would not have been an option.

“Are you okay?” Frank asked.

I was bent over, shivering. There was a white patch the size of a quarter on the carpet. I concentrated on the spot and said, “Go on.”

“She was resting against this big, sharp rock, and there was blood on the rock, and Will realized she’d hit her head. He couldn’t hear her breathing, so he put his ear against her chest. When he didn’t hear anything, he tore open her shirt to listen to her heart, and still there wasn’t a sound. He tried mouth-to-mouth. He wasn’t sure how to, he was just copying what he’d seen on TV. He picked up her hand and felt for a pulse. He sat there with her for ten minutes, fifteen, trying to revive her. ‘But there wasn’t anything I could do for her,’ he told me. And while he talked, he was still crying, still holding on to that necklace. Finally he picked her up and carried her to the car.”

I thought of Thorpe’s description of how she had been found. Clothed, but with her blouse open, the top four buttons gone. The fact that the buttons hadn’t been found at the scene had been an indication that the crime might have happened elsewhere, but no one could figure out where. Thorpe had dismissed the matter of the buttons. According to his scenario, she had died in the place she was buried.

“Before he put her in,” Frank said, “he laid a blanket across the seat. That’s something I’ve never really forgiven him for. Everything else, and the blanket is what I keep coming back to. Because it means he didn’t want blood in the car. For whatever reason, while Lila lay there dead, he had the common sense to cover his tracks.

“There were no other cars on the highway. He was frantic, he didn’t know what to do. His first thought was to take her to the hospital. But then he saw that there was blood on his hands, his clothes. He started thinking about what would happen when he got there, how he’d be accused of doing something terrible, when he’d never meant to hurt her at all. So instead he drove out to Armstrong Woods, carried her into the trees, and laid her down on the ground, and arranged her as best he could, as if she were sleeping. He was sitting there, staring down at her, and he saw the necklace, and he felt that he needed something to take with him, to prove that what had happened was real. Because part of him thought it was all some terrible hallucination, some bad trip. After leaving her, he drove out to Johnson’s Beach, wrapped his clothes up in layers of bags, and tossed them in a Dumpster. He washed up in the river, then took her backpack out to Healdsburg and dumped it in a bin behind a restaurant. He didn’t want his clothes and her body anywhere near each other. Then he drove out here, which was the only place he could think to go, and that’s how I found him on the doorstep early that next morning.”