The Whole Truth

  She shakes her head at me, and smiles, and I’m happy that she is not offended by this admission of his. “The things I don’t know.”

  But the phrase “good riddance” is exactly what Jaime Suarez said when the paramedics loaded Ray onto the courtroom elevator. It’s an unpleasant connection between a father and a son, and this one I decide not to share with her. I want to give her something—anything—good to know about Ray, instead, and so I remember my note to myself.

  “Did I tell you he plays the guitar well?”

  Her face melts. “He does? How do you know that, Marie?”

  “He played for me when I interviewed him.”

  “Really? He plays well?”

  “Yes, and more than just your basic rock and roll chords, too. Somebody has taught him chord progressions, and—”

  I cut off my own words, because she’s staring into space as if at a dawning awareness of something hideous.

  “Katherine?” Jack asks. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

  I leaned toward her. “What? What did I say, Katherine?”

  “Who taught him?”

  “To play the guitar? I don’t know. The guy he worked for was a part-time musician, and we thought maybe he taught Ray.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Ray’s employer? Uh, Miller. Donor Miller.”

  Katherine utters a strangled scream, and Jack and I both leap to our feet, scared at the sound of it. He gets to her first, and bends over her, saying urgently, “What is it, Katherine?”

  “Mr. Miller!” she says, looking stunned, and frightened. “Cal’s music teacher. That was his name. A funny name. Donor Miller.”

  Jack looks as if he could have a heart attack.

  “Donor Miller?” I am practically shouting it.

  “I never heard of the man!” Jack exclaims.

  Katherine is shaking her head, and soon her whole body is shaking. She grabs onto Jack’s two hands to steady herself, and stares up at him. “You wouldn’t have. We wouldn’t have mentioned him. He was supposed to have moved away before Johnny disappeared. He quit giving lessons. They said he moved to”—she looks up at me with even greater horror—“Florida.”

  “Oh, my god,” is all I can say.

  “We didn’t investigate him,” Jack tells me, looking ill.

  He kneels beside her while she still clings to him.

  “Mr. Miller,” Katherine says, in a deadened voice. “Cal quit taking lessons, after Mr. Miller left. We tried to get him to take more, from a different teacher, but he threw a fit, and just refused. It was really hard to get him to practice, and to go to lessons—”

  Again, that look of dawning, awful comprehension.

  She breaks off, and gets up stiffly and walks to the telephone, looking suddenly like an elderly woman. We hear her punch in a number, then hear her say in a shaky, loving voice, “Cal, honey? Could you come over this morning, please? I know, honey, you have to go to work, but can you call in late? You know I wouldn’t ask this if it weren’t terribly important. I really have to ask you something.”

  She comes back to the table.

  “Katherine—” Jack begins.

  She holds up her hands, as if warding off evil. “Please, I don’t want to talk now. We’ll wait for Cal to get here.”

  In worried silence, Jack and I sit with her.

  When her elder son arrives, and sees us waiting for him, he looks immediately wary, and sinks slowly down into the fourth chair at the kitchen table. He’s wearing a fresh white shirt, but the trousers look like yesterday’s. Katherine has told me he does something arcane in data processing that he has tried to explain to her but which she doesn’t understand. Now she takes both of his hands in both of hers so that he cannot run away, and she says gently, and in a tremulous voice that brings tears to my own eyes, “Cal, dearest, do you remember anything about your old music teacher?”

  “No,” he says, so quickly that we know it’s a lie.

  “Please, Cal.” His mother is begging. “Please, tell me.”

  “No! I don’t have anything to say. I don’t even remember him.”

  “You were twelve years old, Cal. You hated those music lessons. Why, Cal?” She is persistent, stubborn, but her face is suffused in love and pity. “Why did you hate them so much?”

  “Oh, Mom!” He looks trapped, furious. “Don’t ask me.”

  “Cal, listen to me. The man your brother was working for down in Florida when he killed that child? That man’s name is Donor Miller.”

  Her son flinches, begins to breathe hard, but still he fights it. “So? What’s that supposed to mean, Mom? That name doesn’t mean anything to me. I never heard it before.”

  “Yes, you have, Cal. I know you remember Mr. Miller.”

  He shoots me a hostile look, and I immediately stand up, and say, “You need some privacy. I’ll go outside.” Before Katherine can object, I hurry out the kitchen door. In a few moments, I am joined by Jack, who says, “Cal doesn’t want me there.”

  He sounds hurt, and I pat his arm, to comfort him.

  “What do you think that’s all about?” he asks me.

  I am astonished that he has to ask, but maybe sometimes even retired deputy sheriffs don’t want to know. In a few words, I tell him what I think that Cal is telling his mother.

  It finally came out, angrily and tearfully from a grown man with painful and guilty memories: How Mr. Miller shut the door to the little music room in the basement of the instrument store, and how he sexually abused the little boys while their mothers waited on chairs outside in the hallway.

  “I didn’t know what to do, Mom,” Cal told her while she wept for him. He sounded more like a child, telling it, than the grown man he is. “Mr. Miller told me he would hurt my little brother if I told anybody.” His mouth trembled, but he controlled that, setting it again in an angry line. “I was glad when they said he had moved out of town and couldn’t give lessons anymore. I knew we were all safe then.”

  At that moment, the truth finally hit Cal Kepler.

  His mother saw it in his face, but she also saw that he would not break, not even now. “It’s not my fault!” he cried out. “I didn’t tell! It’s not my fault!”

  His mother tried to comfort him, saying, “Oh, my child, of course, it isn’t—”

  But he flung himself away from her, and fled the house, brushing past Jack and me in the yard as if we were shrubbery. Jack called out Cal’s name, but got no response. Cal got in his car, and drove away too fast for safety. I said a quick prayer for his well-being, and I thought: This is a healing that’s going to take long, hard work.

  Katherine told us the rest of the story:

  Once a week, she drove Cal to his guitar lessons, and she took his younger brother with her. Cal often came out of the little room in tears, but the music teacher, Mr. Miller, was reassuring. Cal was doing well; kids often found lessons frustrating; she shouldn’t be worried by a few tears, “should she, Cal, because you really love your guitar lessons, don’t you, Cal?” Mr. Miller was kind of a grubby man, Katherine thought, but he was always so nice to the boys, and especially to Cal’s little brother, always pausing to say “what a cute kid. Cal, you’re lucky to have such a nice little brother, aren’t you?”

  “Where is he?” she demands of me. “Can he be arrested now?”

  I have to tell her that Donor Miller is also missing.

  She throws her hands up in the air, as if the world is a hopeless place, and gets up and leaves the table. In a moment, we hear the door to the bathroom close.

  The old deputy looks stricken to his soul, and a decade older.

  “We should have found her boy,” he says miserably, taking the blame. “Maybe we weren’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough. Well, I guess that’s pretty clear. I failed Katherine.”

  “How could you know about a name they didn’t give you, Jack?”

  “We should have known.”

  “Jack, how could you? We didn’t have the
awareness then that we do now. And law enforcement agencies didn’t have the tools. You didn’t have DNA. There wasn’t any FBI profiling. I’ll bet you didn’t have fiber analysis or lie detectors. There weren’t any networks set up to find missing people, or perpetrators.”

  “We had plain old-fashioned police work.”

  “It wouldn’t be enough now, much less then.”

  “We didn’t have much to go on,” he tells me, not as if he’s making excuses, more as if he’s reminding himself. “No witnesses. No motives. No evidence. And none of those things you just said. We were so desperate that we even thought maybe Nathan Leopold did it.” He looks at me. “Remember him?”

  “Loeb and Leopold?”

  “Yep.”

  I recall that they were wealthy, brilliant Chicago teenagers who kidnapped and murdered a boy just for the experience of killing someone, and to see if they could get away with it.

  “Richard Loeb got killed in prison,” Jack tells me, “but Leopold was released a few months before Johnnie disappeared. There was this rumor that Leopold took him. I half-believed it myself, until he showed up working at a hospital in Puerto Rico. Lived there all the rest of his life, and didn’t get into any more trouble. But that just goes to show how desperate we got.”

  “I know you did everything you could do.”

  “You know, I heard a private investigator one time say he could find anybody. What’s more, all he had to do was search the Internet. Well, I’m here to tell you it’s not that easy to find somebody—like a child—who gets taken. Some people are just never going to get found. And their bodies aren’t going to get found, either.”

  “I know.”

  He cocks his head, and appraises me. “You do, don’t you? I suppose the research you do—?”

  I start to agree, to let it go at that. But this man’s deepest feelings are being revealed to me. It might be a kindness to balance the emotional scales a bit. “My parents disappeared, Jack, a long time ago. Ten years before Johnnie did. I wasn’t quite a year old. So I know quite a bit about how some people never turn up again.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he says, looking amazed. “What happened?”

  I really don’t want to tell him, but then I never do want to talk about it. Getting any words out of me about my parents is like forcing bricks through cement, except when I am actively searching for them. Then I’ll ask questions all over the world about them, as if they were just another couple of people in one of my true crime books. At those times I can be quite the objective, efficient researcher. It’s different if I have to talk about them as their daughter. “I don’t know what happened.” That’s the easy answer, and true as far as it goes. “One day they were there, and the three of us were living at home together, and the next day they weren’t, and I was found in a crib in a motel room at the edge of town.”

  “Where was this?”

  It seems that I’m distracting him, and he’s letting me do it. This has an air of unreality to it, but I don’t fight it.

  “Birmingham, Alabama.”

  “Ten years before Johnnie, did you say?”

  “Sixty-six.”

  “Were they civil rights workers?”

  That’s quick of him, but of course almost everybody associates the name Birmingham with the phrase civil rights.

  “They were—associated with what was happening down there.” I feel myself getting anxious. I really, really don’t want this conversation to continue. “Anyway, they never turned up, and I keep looking. Like you kept looking for Johnnie. Maybe they’re like him, and they’re living under another identity somewhere, and they’ve forgotten I exist. Or, maybe they’re dead at the bottom of an ocean. I’ll probably never know.”

  “Johnnie finally turned up.”

  “Yes,” I agree, a little wryly, “he did.”

  “Against all odds.”

  “And sometimes lightning does strike twice.”

  “Could I have heard about your parents? Was it in the news?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t remember it.”

  “Lightfoot isn’t my real name, it’s a pseudonym for my books.”

  “Oh. What were your parents’ names?”

  Like a deer in the headlights, I stare at him. “Folletino. Daniel and Angela Folletino.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell, I’m sorry.”

  I’m not sorry, I’m relieved. All the years of my life, I have never reconciled my desire to find them with my fear of finding out about them. They were a controversial, even notorious couple where they came from, and I know a few people who still get riled up at the mention of those names.

  Jack says, sheepishly, “I guess I was hoping I could produce a miracle for you, on the spot. If I couldn’t find Johnnie for Katherine, maybe I could tell you that I recognized your parents’ names from some old case I worked on a long time ago.”

  I’m touched. “You’re a nice man, Jack Lawrence.” I reach over to grasp one of his hands. “I’m honored to have made your acquaintance.”

  “Don’t see why,” he mutters, with his head down.

  Katherine comes back into the kitchen, and sinks back down into her chair. She looks as if she has been crying and then washed her face, and she looks defeated. “We have to help Cal,” she says in a whispery voice that doesn’t even sound like her. This latest revelation seems to have punctured her in a place that allowed her resilience and her courage to leak out. Her words are brave, but the tone in which she says them speaks more of depression than of courage. “We have to do everything we can to help him now.”

  Not knowing what else to do, I start picking up dirty dishes and taking them to the sink. I turn on the water and start rinsing them and placing them in the dishwater, glad for something to do with my hands at a moment when I might otherwise only wring them helplessly.

  It isn’t long before Jack inquires of me, “Hadn’t we better get you to the airport?”

  It’s true that I do have reservations out in a couple of hours.

  Before I go, I urge Katherine, “Come to Florida, and stay with me. There will be tremendous media interest in your story, and maybe Ray will see it. If he knows he has a family, and you’re looking for him, maybe he’ll turn himself in, Katherine. It’s worth a try, don’t you think?”

  I think this is a good idea, and I’m guessing she will, too.

  At first, she looks caught in despair, and taken aback. “I don’t know, Marie.”

  “What if it lured Johnnie into coming in?”

  Her eyes light up as if I’ve given her hope again. “Oh! Yes, I would do that, yes!”

  I tell her I’ll start working on it the minute I get back home, and she promises to arrange to go to Florida as soon as possible. “Maybe Kim can come with me.”

  “My guest room has twin beds.”

  She grabs my hands. “Thank you, Marie.”

  But as Jack drives me away from the house in his truck, and I twist around to wave at Katherine standing on her front porch, I can’t escape the feeling that I’ve flown through like a tornado, leaving these nice people to pick up the jagged pieces of devastation I’ve left behind. I didn’t mean to do it, and it surely had to happen. But for somebody who claims she doesn’t want to do any harm, I seem to be leaving a lot of pain in my path. If Katherine ever gets to see her youngest son again, that will bring more pain, too. The memory of Johnnie Kepler is one thing, but the living reality of Ray Raintree—that’s another thing entirely.

  Forty-five minutes later, I suggest to Jack that he drop me off at the curb, but he won’t hear of it. Again, he lifts my overnight bag for me. On the way in through the automatic doors, he says, “You tell those Florida cops, they can have any information they need from me, and I’m going to go back and see if I can find out more about this Miller fellow.”

  “I will, Jack.”

  I thank him, and then stand on my tiptoes to give him an impulsive hug and a kiss on his cheek.

  “Nobody could have f
ound him, Jack.”

  “Maybe not, but it’s still going to haunt me to my grave.”

  I believe it, and I know there isn’t anything but the grace of god that will ever ease his heart, or Katherine Kepler’s.

  After Jack leaves me, I locate a pay phone and call the Bahia Beach Police Department, where I’m lucky enough to catch Robyn Anschutz at her desk. I tell her everything I have learned, but when I finish, she says, “Yeah, but it doesn’t help us find Ray.”

  That’s right, I think. He’s still Raymond Raintree to everybody down there. He has become Johnnie Kepler to me, at least for a little while, although as I get away from his family, it’s harder to hang on to that earlier identity of his. My knowledge of Ray comes pouring back, polluting the memory of the little boy he was.

  “I hate it when I end up feeling sorry for perps,” Robyn says. “There’s that moment in their lives, you know the one I mean? Where they go from being victims to being perpetrators of their own crimes. That’s a very confusing moment for me. On one side of that moment, I feel sorry for them. On the other side of it, I step in and arrest them.”

  “It’s like the moment just before an abused child hurts an animal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One minute he’s an innocent, the next minute he’s a monster.”

  “Yeah. That’s the line.”

  “All of our pity’s on one side of it and all of our hate’s on the other side of it.”

  “Once they cross that line, it’s all over for them.”

  “No more pity.”

  “Yeah, we just have to catch them and put them out of commission. At least, that’s what I think we have to do, but it bothers me sometimes. If anything about my job keeps me awake, that does.”

  “Maybe it should keep us all awake.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “It’s the moment I try to define in my books.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It’s also the moment when somebody turns into a victim. One minute they’re alive and safe, the next minute they’re not.”

  “Yeah! It’s the same moment, isn’t it?”