Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

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.”

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.”

“We had no idea who they were at the beginning,” Trudy said. “We took them in like we took everybody else in. No questions asked.”

“Was Anna the child Sherwyn molested?”

“No. It was a boy.”

Donnally closed his eyes, trying to imagine Anna and Sherwyn arguing in the living room, and Rover and Trudy listening in the kitchen. The image led him to a question: What brought Sherwyn to the house in the first place? He directed it at Trudy.

“Did she tell you why Sherwyn had showed up after all those years?”

Trudy shrugged. “Anna said she wanted to look into some things first, but promised to tell me about it. She used the phrase, ‘do some research.’ ”

“She was murdered a week later, before she had a chance,” Sonny said, reaching over and taking Trudy’s hand.

“Did you find anything about Sherwyn in the house afterwards?” Donnally asked.

Sonny shook his head. “We looked through all of her papers, her diary, everything. Nothing with his name on it.”

Donnally looked at Trudy. “You still have all that stuff?”

Trudy looked at Sonny, then back at Donnally. The same hesitation. Then the same twitch.

“No.”

“T rudy fell in love with Artie and bought the guns they used to kill Tsukamata,” Sonny said, as he drove them from the property that night.

“Why’d they kill him?”

“He suspected that Artie and Robert weren’t who they claimed to be and they were afraid he’d eventually figure it out. Artie got Tsukamata to pull him over for speeding and Robert was already set up on a rooftop with a rifle. The police came knocking on Trudy’s door a week after the murder. They just couldn’t prove she knew what the guns were for when she bought them, otherwise they would’ve charged her as an accessory.”