Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

“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?”

“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.”