Forgotten Witness (36 page)

“So, if I extrapolate that this is something the government doesn’t want anyone to know about, then maybe someone in government ordered Ha Kuna House razed.” Faye raised a brow. Hearing the thought spoken out loud was sobering but even Faye wasn’t convinced. “But you’re still alive. Emily is here.”

“The body count was correct. There was an extra girl in the house and Emily was with us. That meant that there were still five people in the house plus Reynolds. No one knew Amelia or I had spent the night. Everyone just assumed we were where we were supposed to be: Amelia at her house, me on Maui, and Emily in her room.”

“And I received notification through the court as attorney of record for Josie that Emily was dead. Case closed. Josie has no legal standing and therefore could not claim her mother’s body. They referred me to a contact at MPS if she’s interested in follow-up. But I guarantee you that by the time anyone inquires about the remains, they will be gone. All neat and tidy,” Stephen said.

“Whoever is responsible for this was wise enough to know that killing a handful of people the world forgot about was preferable to doing anything to me. That would have raised questions,” Josie added.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Faye said. “I ran Peter Johnson like you asked. He is not a nice fellow.”

“Is he in the service?”

“Not anymore. He was dishonorably discharged. Drug trafficking. He has been employed by Blacknight Security. I don’t know if they placed him at Ha Kuna House though.”

“A mercenary?” Stephen breathed.

Josie answered. “Maybe the feds should look around the place. Hawaii’s notorious for its pot farms and that house was sitting on forty acres. Maybe that’s what he was taking care of.”

“Which adds another dimension to the tragic fire,” Stephen suggested.

“If that’s what he was doing. It’s not our concern unless he shows up on my doorstep,” Josie said.

“God help him if he does,” Stephen said.

“But I still want to know how Emily got there,” Faye insisted.

“I think my father put her there. I don’t know why. I don’t know how he pulled it off, but the evidence doesn’t look good.” Josie put her hands on the table and pushed back.

“What are you going to do now?” Faye asked.

“I’m going to get some air.”

***

Michael Horn put on his favorite sweater and over that a sweatshirt that had seen better days. He had on his fleece lined sweatpants. He pulled on his gloves and a watch cap. He left the television playing as was his habit. Not that it would deter the people who concerned him, but the sound of it always gave him the feeling that things were normal when he opened the door again. So the TV stayed on when Mark went out for his evening run.

On the porch, he jogged in place and gave himself an energetic hug. It was going to be a horrendously cold winter considering the end of fall was already freezing. He looked around the neighborhood. The Meisen’s lights were on. Mrs. Garfield’s upstairs lights shined. In the early dark, the houses looked a million miles away. That was too bad. He wouldn’t mind waving at a neighbor now and again or lingering over the fence for a chat. That’s what he got for being able to afford a place with acreage.

Inside, the phone rang but he decided if he didn’t leave right then he’d simply go inside and fix himself a bowl of soup and call it a day. He tapped down the steps, saw his breath in the air and thought he should consider moving to a smaller place. Then he picked up speed and fell into a nice rhythm and, as always happened, he found himself smiling. Running made him feel free of responsibility and worry. The crisp air carried the sound of his running shoes hitting the pavement. He paid no attention to the car that approached him, illuminated his face, and sped past leaving him in the dark again.

He should have paid attention to the car that came from behind. That one didn’t pass. That one plowed into him, tossing him high in the air. He landed in the field near a windbreak of cypress.

The last thing he heard was a woman screaming at someone to send an ambulance; the last thing he saw was his grandfather walking across the field toward him.

Mind control (also known as brainwashing, coercive persuasion, thought control, or thought reform) refers to a process in which a group or individual “systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator(s), often to the detriment of the person being manipulated”. The term has been applied to any tactic, psychological or otherwise, which can be seen as subverting an individual’s sense of control over their own thinking, behavior, emotions or decision making. –
Wikipedia

CHAPTER 28

While the others slept, Josie went to the hall closet and took down the box that contained everything her father thought was important. The tape across the seams was yellow and brittle and the box was deep, wide, and unwieldy. Until now it had simply been something that moved with her and been stored because she knew what was in it.

She put it on the floor and opened it up. Inside, she found his uniform and a Dodger’s baseball hat. There were twelve love letters from him to Emily and Emily to him, but Josie could only stomach two given what she knew. In a manila envelope, she found what she had been looking for. Joseph Bates’ honorable discharge dated 1982, four years earlier than she’d been led to believe. No one had made a mistake. Archer hadn’t misheard. Here was the proof that her father lied for years. She tossed it aside and dug in again.

She found a coffee cup from Lake Tahoe, a reminder of her parents’ honeymoon. The handle had been broken and her father used it to hold his pens. There was an empty bottle of perfume. Josie held it to her nose and smelled the slightest scent of Shalimar.

She found pictures of Emily, each more beautiful than the last: a wedding photograph, Emily in a bathing suit holding a fancy drink, Emily in a hat in front of church, pregnant with one hand resting on her stomach. Emily and Josie standing in front of the house in Texas. Josie lingered over that one. Her mother’s arm was around her shoulders as if protecting her. Josie was tall and gangly even then, smiling, and having no idea that she shouldn’t be. Josie would keep the ones of her mother and her, but not the wedding picture. Everything her father had owned was going out in the trash, and she would never think about him again.

Josie kept the holster that had held her father’s service revolver, the one that was now in the drawer of her bedside table. She would sell the holster with the gun. It had no meaning for her any longer. Her father didn’t really protect her when she was young, his gun wouldn’t protect her now. There was no magic and she always thought there had been.

There was another envelope filled with her report cards, a picture of her in her volleyball uniform just after she heard she won a scholarship, and a picture of the two of them at her law school graduation. Her father had been so handsome, so disciplined, so smart and supportive. Now she added actor and deceiver to his list of credits. The question was why?

She took an old-fashioned photo album out of the box, sat on the hall floor with her back up against the wall, and balanced it on her outstretched legs. There were pictures of her father as a boy. Josie had barely known her grandparents on either side so the pictures meant little to her.

Finally, Josie grabbed her father’s dress uniform jacket and searched the pockets. She found his dog tags, a set of keys, a coin and she found something she didn’t expect: a small blue velvet box. In the dim light coming from the kitchen, in the silent house, Josie felt incredibly alone the minute she touched it. She wanted to put it back and forget she ever saw it. Instead, Josie flipped the top, took one look at what was inside and closed it again. Her head fell back against the wall. Her hand dropped to her lap.

“Damn,” she whispered.

Here it was, the last nail in her father’s coffin. Inside the box were her parents’ wedding rings. Not just her father’s but her mother’s, too. Josie had spent so many years accusing her mother, convicting her of desertion without evidence and in absentia, and the guilty party was the one with who stayed behind. All those years and he could have put an end to Josie’s grief.

Too tired and too sad to move, Josie thought she would sit that way until dawn but suddenly she was alert. She heard something inside the house that wasn’t right. It could have been the house settling, or Max moving with his dreams, but the danger of Molokai was fresh in her mind and she was on her guard. Slowly, she got to her feet.

Emily and Amelia were at one end of the house and would be of no help if somehow trouble had followed them. Stephen was sleeping on the couch in the den that was close to her bedroom. To reach him and her gun, Josie would have to go through the living room, a big and open space that would leave her vulnerable.

Knowing she had no choice, Josie stepped into the kitchen. She went past the kitchen window. The backyard was no more than a patch of cement, two flowerbeds and bougainvillea clinging to the wall so there was nowhere for anyone to hide. No one was out there.

At the end of the counter, she drew a knife from the block, scooted around the refrigerator, and put her back up against the wall so that she could see the entire living room. Carefully, she edged into the middle of the room and crouched near the sofa for protection but there was no need for caution. There wasn’t an intruder in her house; there was a ghost.

Emily stood in the dining room looking like a child with the pants of her white pajamas covering her feet and the sleeves of the top reaching to her fingertips. Josie walked across the hard wood and up the three steps that led to the entry and the dining room beyond. Max didn’t move. Emily didn’t either. Josie put the knife on the table.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with her mother, she looked at what had caught Emily’s attention: the hula girl plates hanging on the wall. When Josie was little her mother told her they were precious because they reminded her of a happy time. When Josie was older, those plates had saved her life. She could still see the cracks where she had pieced one plate back together after it had fallen off the wall during her struggle with Linda Rayburn. She had ripped into Hannah’s mother with one broken piece because there was no choice. Josie had glued the shards back together because that plate symbolized her life and heart: both were almost broken, both were now pieced back together, and both were stronger for all of it. Standing there with Emily, Josie knew she had been wrong to attach so much meaning to them. These were just cheap plates that her mother had fancied when she was whole. Nothing more and nothing less.

“Come on, it’s late.”

Josie took her mother’s arm, but Emily didn’t move. She turned her head and smiled a glorious smile. She said: “Do they belong to you?”

Josie was too tired to get her hopes up that Emily was remembering but she smiled back nonetheless.

“Yes. I used to love them.”

“I love them, too,” Emily whispered.

Josie turned Emily so that they faced one another in the dark. In her hand was the velvet box. She took the thin gold wedding band out and then tossed the box on the dining room table. Josie took her mother’s right hand, pushed up the long pajama sleeve, and put the ring on her mother’s finger. It was the only thing that had been taken from Emily that she could get back, but Josie would be damned if she would put it on Emily’s left hand.

“This belongs to you,” she said.

Gently, murmuring the way she heard Amelia do, Josie walked her mother to Hannah’s room and put her to bed. Amelia slept and that did Josie’s heart good. She closed the door behind her. Her house was peaceful but she knew that a thousand miles from Molokai was not safe because they were also a thousand miles from Washington, D.C. That, Josie knew, was where all this was heading.

Needing to sleep, needing to clear her mind, Josie went back to the hall wishing Archer was with her. Not to tell her what to do, but to be her sounding board, her confessor, her advisor. If he had no counsel, she wished he was there to make love to her. But he was gone; doing what few men would do for the woman in their lives. He was putting his own on hold for her.

Back in the hall, Josie got on to her knees and repacked her father’s box, but when she lifted the old album an envelope slipped out and fluttered to the floor. She picked it up and sat back on her heels to examine the pale blue onion paper emblazoned with bars of U.S.A. red. It was an old airmail envelope addressed to her father. The sender was Father C. Ridge. Turning it over, she took out the sheet of paper and unfolded it. She read it once. She read it twice.

Don’t worry about God. Forgive yourself.

Josie looked at the envelope again. The postmark was Berlin. She got off the floor and went to the kitchen to rummage through the drawers. Finally, she found a small magnifying glass. Flipping on the light over the sink, she peered at the barely legible date stamp: 1992.

She put the letter back in the envelope and the envelope in her pocket. God might have forgiven Joseph Bates, he might have even forgiven himself, but since God wasn’t going to smite anyone for her father’s sin and her mother’s trial, Josie figured it was up to her. When she went about it, though, she wanted to have as much ammunition as possible because she didn’t want to leave anyone who was responsible for this standing.

“I got a handle on the guy who was driving the truck.” –
Archer

“Take the sheriff with you.” –
Josie

“Jo, I don’t need anyone looking over my shoulder. Let me get the lay of the land first.” –
Archer

“Okay. I trust you. I miss you.” –
Josie

“But you’re not going to wait for me to get back to finish this thing with your mom.” –
Archer

“I’ve got to do it now.” –
Josie

“Just thought you might need a hand to hold.” –
Archer