I don’t know what I was thinking.
“How does it feel to be a murderer?” the agent asks Danny.
“I never meant to kill him,” Danny says. “I’m no murderer.”
“Even now,” the agent says, gesturing to the body, “you’re unwilling to take responsibility for your actions. Unbelievable. You, Danny Edwards, are the most reprehensible human I’ve ever met.”
Danny doesn’t argue.
“You and your accomplice,” the agent adds.
“Accomplice?” Danny says.
CHAPTER 37
NANCY IS BACK in the interrogation room.
It’s late at night. Earlier today, she told the female police officer that she needed to talk to someone, but hours passed before the woman led her down the hall, back to the interrogation room.
The agent in charge is already there, waiting.
His tie and suit jacket are gone, and his collar, now open, has yellowed with sweat and dust. His hair is disheveled, and his eyes have dark crescent moons beneath them. Despite how exhausted he obviously is, his expression is as alert as when she first spoke to him.
“I’m ready to tell you everything I know,” Nancy says. “I didn’t do anything and I didn’t know what Danny was up to.”
The agent gives her a look that silences her.
“We found Stephen Small,” he says.
“Good,” she says. “Thank God.”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh no,” she says. “That’s awful.”
“When you and Danny concocted this scheme, whose idea was it?”
Nancy stares at him, dumbfounded.
“I told you,” she says. “I had no—”
“Yeah, yeah,” the agent says. “You just happened to go for a ride with Danny late at night to get your bicycle fixed. And then he called the guy and it turned out he couldn’t fix the bike after all. You expect us to believe that?”
“It’s the truth,” she says, and then clarifies, “That’s what Danny told me anyway.”
The agent leans in and puts his elbows on the table. His glasses have gotten progressively dirtier as the day has gone on, and he stares at her through smudged lenses.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s talk about the truth. Danny told us that you picked him up after he buried Stephen Small alive.”
Nancy goes cold.
“That’s true,” she says quietly.
“So you knew he was burying Stephen Small out in the sand hills?”
“No!” she says, practically yelling. “I picked him up. I didn’t know what he was doing.”
The agent smirks and shakes his head disapprovingly.
Nancy knows how ridiculous it sounds. She picked Danny up late at night in the middle of nowhere, and the agent is supposed to believe she didn’t know what she was doing there. She can hardly believe it herself. What was she thinking trusting Danny?
“You told us before that you were sleeping. Oh, wait.” He consults his notes. “You told us you were watching a video. Oh, wait, you told us both lies.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, flustered, unsure what more to say.
“Which is it?” the agent says. “Were you sleeping? Watching a video? Or helping your drug-dealing boyfriend commit felony kidnapping?”
“No,” Nancy blurts out. “None of those.”
“So what’s your story now?”
Nancy takes a deep breath.
“I picked Danny up,” she says. “I didn’t know what he was doing. I didn’t want to know. If I had any idea he was kidnapping someone, I never would have gone along. I would have run as far away from him as I could.”
“Lady,” the agent says, “you should have gotten as far away from him as you could a long time ago. But you didn’t. You knew he was a drug dealer and you stayed with him. Why would I believe you didn’t know about this?”
The agent rises and clears his throat.
“Nancy Rish, you are under arrest for the kidnapping and murder of Stephen Small. You have the right to remain silent—”
“No,” Nancy says, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Yes, you did,” the agent says. “You helped Danny Edwards kidnap and murder Stephen Small.”
He continues reciting the Miranda rights, but Nancy doesn’t hear him. She’s too preoccupied crying. She puts her head in her hands and sobs.
She can think of only one thing.
Her son growing up without a mother.
CHAPTER 38
10 years later
NANCY SITS IN the visitation area of the Logan Correctional Center. Around her, other women, all wearing the same prison-issued jumpsuits, wait for their family members. Husbands enter and hug their wives. Sons and daughters come in and either embrace their mothers or sit down in a huff, glaring at the women.
Nancy knows some of the women. Others are just faces in the halls of the prison. Some of them are nice; others are mean. Some are tough and scary, and others cry at night, weeping for what they’ve lost.
Nancy keeps craning her head toward the entrance. She is especially anxious today. She always expects him to look younger than he is, as if time will have stopped on the outside world while she’s been locked away. She expects an eight-year-old boy to run and leap into her arms like she’s just been away for the weekend. But then the real Benji strides in—a man now, no longer a boy—wearing a button-down shirt and tie. Today, he holds a black square object in his hand and grins sheepishly.
Nancy’s mouth bursts into a wide, uncontrollable smile. Tears pool in her eyes.
“I did it, Mom,” Ben says, holding out the object.
It’s the cap from his graduation regalia, complete with a yellow tassel marked with the words Class of ’97.
She throws her arms around his neck and grips him in a tight hug.
“I’m proud of you,” she says, unable to keep herself from crying. “I wish I could have been there.”
“Me too,” he says, and begins to cry too.
A guard walks toward their table and tells them to separate. Wiping her eyes, Nancy sits. Ben does too. She wants to hold his hand, but that is against the rules also. It’s hard to sit this close to him and not touch him, but she’ll try to sneak another hug before he leaves.
Ben tells her about the graduation ceremony, which fills her with joy and sadness. She wants to hear all about it, but hearing him speak of the ceremony—a milestone event in his life that she couldn’t be there for—is also like pressing on a bruise that never heals.
She’s been locked up for ten years, and still the frustration over her powerlessness never ebbs, never weakens. She can’t be there for her son and can’t imagine a more painful way to live her day-to-day life.
Inevitably, as it does every time Ben visits, their conversation turns to the status of her appeals. Her lawyer is getting ready to file the papers, she says.
Nancy was sentenced to life in prison for murder, with another thirty years tacked on for aggravated kidnapping. In short, she is supposed to spend the rest of her life behind bars, without the possibility of parole. If she can’t overturn her conviction, she will die in prison of old age.
It could have been worse. Because the murder was committed during the act of a felony, the crime qualified for the death penalty. That’s the sentence Danny Edwards received.
There is a rumor going around that the state plans to abolish the death penalty, which would commute Danny’s sentence to life in prison without parole, essentially the same as Nancy’s.
But Nancy is confident that her appeal will overturn her conviction.
It has to. She’s already missed her son’s childhood. She doesn’t want to miss the rest of his life.
“I promise you,” Nancy says, reaching out and breaking the rules by grabbing his hand, “I will spend however long it takes to get out of here. I will come home to you.”
Ben takes this cue to hug her. When a security guard heads their way, they split up and
Ben heads for the door, holding his graduation cap at his side.
Tears streak Nancy’s cheeks.
As she heads back to her cell, she thinks about what landed her here. Not the murder of Stephen Small, but what she is actually guilty of—blindly loving the wrong man.
She thinks about Danny and wonders where he is. She imagines him sitting in a cell, thinking somehow that he is a victim in all this. It wasn’t fair he couldn’t make ends meet. It wasn’t fair other people had so much money. It wasn’t fair that Stephen Small died from asphyxiation when Danny never actually wanted to hurt him. Danny always blamed everyone else.
She wonders if Danny feels any guilt for the lives he destroyed. Not just those of Stephen Small and his family.
But her life too.
She settles back into her cell and sits down on the bunk. Her cell is similar to the first one she was locked in all those years ago: metal toilet, metal sink, cinder-block walls. It makes her long for the leaking dishwasher and chipped paint of her old town house.
The cell also has a small desk in the corner, and taped above it are pictures that Ben has sent her over the years. She missed his first day of middle school, his first day of high school. She wasn’t there for him when he was getting ready for prom. She didn’t help him study for his SATs. She won’t be there to see him off to college.
So much has been taken from her.
It isn’t fair, she thinks.
Then she stops herself and wonders for a moment if she is just like Danny, putting all the blame on someone else.
She knew Danny was up to something. She didn’t know it was kidnapping. She didn’t know it was murder. But she knew something bad was happening, and she went along with it. She wasn’t just ignorant of what happened. She chose ignorance despite warning sign after warning sign.
A man died.
A wife lost her husband.
Three boys lost their father.
Could she have stopped this from happening if she’d done anything differently? Could she have at least protected herself and her son by getting as far away from Danny as possible?
What could she have done differently?
She lies down on her bunk and stares at the ceiling, thinking.
She won’t come to any answers today, nor anytime soon. As she looks around her prison cell, she knows there will be plenty of time to ponder these questions.
Finally honest with herself, Nancy Rish knows she will be in prison for a long, long time.
PROLOGUE
1990
A FLASH OF color broke in on her dream and startled her awake.
I knew I shouldn’t have had that second Vodka Collins, Bonnie thought.
Hard alcohol always made her jumpy, restless. She rolled onto her side, shut her eyes, felt a faint mountain breeze coming through the cracked window.
But then she heard what sounded like a man clearing his throat, and she knew it was this sound, and not her dream, that had woken her. The noise hadn’t come from the man lying beside her, who wasn’t so much asleep as passed out, but from somewhere farther off in the room. She sat up, reached for the lamp on her nightstand.
“Don’t bother,” the intruder said. “This will be over real quick.”
Bonnie’s first instinct was to pull the covers up around her neck. She looked toward the voice and squinted. A large silhouette emerged from the darkness. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought the man was smiling. Maybe this was a joke. Another prank being played by one of the patrons from the bar.
“I don’t know you are, but this isn’t funny,” Bonnie said. “In fact, it’s criminal. If you’re still here by the time I switch this light on, I will press charges.”
Her own words sounded strange to her, like she’d borrowed the phrasing from her schoolmarm mother. Maybe, she thought, that’s how people cope with terror: by channeling someone else.
“He don’t wake easy,” the intruder said, gesturing to the other side of the bed with what Bonnie now saw was a long-barreled revolver. “Must be all that Jack D,” he added.
So he had been watching them at the bar. Another local who didn’t want an Orange County developer—especially a female developer—scooping up property on their mountain. She would just have to show them that she was here to stay, that she hadn’t bought Camp Nelson Lodge on a whim: she’d fallen in love with the place. She sat up straighter, reached for the light. The porcelain base of the lamp seemed to explode before she heard the shot. She screamed, slammed her back flat against the wall.
The man beside her stirred, then came fully awake. He threw the covers back, swung his legs out of bed, and stumbled forward, still drunk. A second shot and he staggered, grabbed the dresser, brought it down on top of him.
The room went silent just long enough for Bonnie to realize she was going to die. Somehow the setting felt all wrong. Or rather the setting was right, but the timing was wrong. She was supposed to finish raising her kids here. Grow old here. Spend her waning years sharing the backwoods with her grandchildren.
She tried to call for help but couldn’t find the air inside her. The man raised his gun. Bonnie shut her eyes.
It was over.
CHAPTER 1
1989
“WE DROVE FIVE hours and he’s the one who’s late?” Jim said.
“By five minutes,” Bonnie said. “Besides, the drive along that gorge was as beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Made me carsick.”
Bonnie climbed atop the picnic table and turned in a slow circle, craning her neck to see the tops of the sequoias, taking deep breaths of mountain air. Jim sat on the bench, brushed a pine needle from the flannel shirt he’d worn to blend in with the locals.
“I feel like the Marlboro Man,” he said.
Bonnie didn’t hear him, or at least pretended not to. Jim scanned the property. With its stone façade, the lodge appeared sturdy enough, but the two-story motel looming in the background looked like it might topple from one well-placed kick, and the small cabins, set at random distances along the periphery of the main clearing, were bordering on disrepair. Nestled among the world’s tallest trees, with the Sierra Nevada rising to the east, it was, as Bonnie said, a beautiful spot. But there were a lot of beautiful places in the world, and Jim didn’t see the point in anchoring yourself to just one.
“That must be Rudy,” Bonnie said, nodding at the short, squat man exiting the main building.
“About time,” Jim said.
“Shush now,” Bonnie told him.
Rudy waved as he walked toward them. Jim stood, looked at his watch.
“Mr. and Mrs. Hood?” Rudy called.
Bonnie nodded.
“Welcome to Camp Nelson Lodge. I’m really sorry about the wait. The plumbing in the lodge got cranky. I’m not going to lie: that happens pretty regular these days.”
Bonnie shook his hand, then turned to Jim: “You see? I told you we’re blessed to have a realtor who doesn’t work Sundays. We’re going to get the inside story.”
Now that Rudy was up close, Jim noticed a fresh grease stain running across the man’s ratty polo shirt. Rudy had muscular forearms, a barrel chest, and a gut that suggested long nights in the saloon. His salt-and-pepper hair was in bad need of a shampooing. Jim pegged him as a ne’er-do-well: a middle-aged man who’d attached himself to a near-vacant lodge in order to keep a roof over his own lazy head.
“What exactly do you do here again?” Jim asked.
“I’m the caretaker.”
Jim glanced around.
“No offense,” he said, “but it doesn’t look like you’ve been busy.”
Bonnie gave him a sharp jab with her elbow.
“It’s okay,” Rudy said. “More honesty: I’m a staff of one with no budget. I’ve been hoping someone would come along and sink some money into this place.”
“Sink?” Jim asked.
Rudy grinned.
“I mean invest,” he said. “Look around. There isn’t another parce
l of land like this one anywhere in the world. Every morning I step outside and I remember that life is a miracle. If I had kids, I’d raise ’em right here.”
“Maybe you should have been a realtor,” Jim said.
“Nah,” Rudy said. “I’m not trying to sell you anything. Truth is, it’s sad what’s happened to Camp Nelson Lodge. It used to be bustling with city folks whose souls needed a rest. They’d show up looking like they’d been wound so tight their nerves were snapping, and within a couple of days you’d see all that tension just leave their bodies. This place can be magic that way. But now it’s just part of the Edwards Group’s portfolio, and they’ve let it rot. We haven’t taken a guest in two years. The saloon is still open for locals, but that’s it. Like I said, I’ve been praying Edwards’d sell. I’d buy the place myself if I had the money.”
“I used to come here with my parents when I was a kid,” Bonnie said. “I never stopped dreaming about the sequoias. You’re right: Camp Nelson is magical.”
Rudy gave a solemn nod; Jim sniggered.
“I’d settle for functional,” Jim said.
Rudy took them on a tour, beginning with the lodge. The lobby was a long, open space with twin stone fireplaces, one at either end. The ceiling beams were made of solid logs (“This is a logging community,” Rudy pointed out), and the floor of ceramic tile. The walls were covered with unfinished wood panels, which Jim thought gave an otherwise stately room the look of a semifinished basement.
“It’s real wood, Jim,” Bonnie said, “not laminate.”
The dining room/meeting hall featured wraparound windows and looked onto a small meadow separated from the forest by a stream.
“The view’s not bad—I’ll give you that. But even my grandmother wouldn’t have put up with this wallpaper,” Jim said.
“You can change the wallpaper,” Bonnie said. “The view is for keeps.”
Jim rapped on one of the windows with his knuckle.