Chapter One
Murder Night: June 1986
Bobby is at my bedroom door, in his tighty-whities. “Wake up. Rachel, wake up!” he
whispers. “I think Daddy cut himself shaving.”
Bobby is nine and I am ten and what he is saying makes no sense. First off, Bobby
has no right to call my father “Daddy,” even if Bobby lives here year-round and I’ve only
come for the summer. But as I rub the sleep from my eyes and look at the clock, the usual
irritation fades into confusion. It’s three thirty a.m.-no time for a shave.
Bobby is gone. I sit up and shuffle alongside my dresser, feeling my way to the
bedroom door. I can scan our entire house from my room: the living room straight across,
the kitchen to the right, the bathroom and Bobby’s room down a short hallway to the left,
and Dad and Sherrie’s room across from it.
It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the moonlight pouring through the
living room window. I make out our powder-blue curtains first, slate gray against the
darkness, and as the rest of the view falls into place, I see the house is empty and still.
Then I look down the hallway, and what I find there sears itself upon my brain: huge,
dark pools in the carpet, like giant grape Kool-Aid spills. Bigger around than basketballs,
sticky wet and black in the colorless night. As I stare at them and remember Bobby’s
nonsensical words about shaving, I know at once that they are pools of blood.
The blood is a flash, a Polaroid snapshot of a shadowy moment, and the next ten
minutes come in flashes too, murky images captured and set aside to develop in slow
motion. In a flash, I’m at the open door of Dad’s bedroom. Dad is standing bare-chested,
deathly white, holding his throat, looking into my eyes and mouthing something I can’t
understand. In a flash, the door slams in my face, and I hear Sherrie shout “I’m calling
911.”
It feels like I stare at that closed door a long time. I don’t know if I try the handle, but
if I do, it’s locked. I don’t know how I step around the blood, how I decide to go back
into my bedroom, how it is that I eventually walk into the living room and quietly take a
seat on the couch next to Bobby. I don’t know who turned the lamp on, but the light is
throwing just enough illumination around the room to make the shadows look that much
deeper. And I don’t know how it is that Bobby and I are both now fully dressed.
The biggest mystery of all, though, is how Bobby knows someone has tried to kill my
father.
He picks up one of Dad’s sweat-stained weight-lifting gloves from the glass-top
coffee table and slips it over his pudgy fingers.
“Maybe we should take these with us,” he says in a serious but steady voice, pulling
the Velcro strap open and closed. “Like a keepsake.”
I pick up the other glove and let the meaning of Bobby’s strange words trickle
through my mind. I slide the glove over my hand. The cutoff finger holes are too big for
me; the glove is a hard, sweaty shell that doesn’t fit, that makes me feel tiny and
protected.
But Bobby has a second thought. “Wait,” he says. “What if that person touched
them!”
He tosses his glove so it slides off the edge of the coffee table and flaps his hands as
if shaking off cooties. I set my glove down gingerly, not believing that whoever came
through our house could have tarnished it but wanting to play along with Bobby’s game
because playing along will let us believe that we can still play games after what we’ve
just seen.
The house hums with noiselessness in the dead night of our country neighborhood. I
try to think of other mementos we might want to take, to ignore the blood splattered
along the wall and soaking on the carpet behind us. The couch is placed so that its back
faces the open hallway. I want to curl up in a ball for fear that someone will pop up
behind me, but Bobby’s presence keeps me from cowering.
Instead I search for cootie-free souvenirs, looking at the airbrushed duck decoy
Bobby and I bought Dad at the flea market a few weeks ago. At Dad’s old record
collection, his beloved Rod Stewart albums, leaning against the TV. At yesterday’s cold
coffee cup forming a creamy brown ring on the coffee table glass.
When the paramedics charge through our living room, it’s like a scene from an action
movie crashing down our hallway. A moment later Sherrie is sitting between us on the
couch, wrapping her hands around our eyes and telling us, “Don’t look, kids, don’t look.”
I look anyway, can just peek over her skinny pinkie and above her shoulder, and I see
Dad’s legs and his feet streaking by on the gurney. I tell myself to remember that last
look well. In my gut I know it will be the last I ever see of Dad.
When we arrive at the emergency room, everyone is there. My grandfather, my aunts
and uncles-it’s like Christmas without the other children. Grandpa Ben gets up from the
plastic waiting-room chair and steps aside with Sherrie into the hallway. Grandma Mae
calls me and Bobby over to sit in her wide lap, to each slide upon her bench-sized thighs,
clenching us to her enormous bosom. “Don’t you worry, kids, your daddy’s tough and
he’s gonna make it!” she says, rocking. I look around the blue-gray fluorescent room at
my aunts and uncles, who don’t seem to share Grandma Mae’s conviction.
It is forever and yet no time at all before a man in blue scrubs walks into the room.
He stands in front of Grandma Mae, looking down on us huddled together. He acts as
though he’s talking just to her. “He lost too much blood,” he says. He says something
about trying to operate, about a piece of knife stuck in the vein. “I’m sorry but he just lost
too much blood, and he’s passed on.”
I think I feel Grandma Mae’s heart stop beating beneath her cushiony chest. She
looks up at the man, silent. “Would you like a moment alone with the body?” he asks.
He’s still talking to Grandma Mae, but it will always feel as though he were asking me
too, as though if I’d had the courage to pipe up, I could have visited my father one last
time.
I’m not quite thinking this though. I’m thinking of cooties. I’m thinking of dead
bodies. I’m thinking that it’s gross to see a dead body, even if it is my father’s. I’m
thinking I have seen enough.
The only entertainment Bobby and I can find on TV at five thirty in the morning is a
fishing show. One of the adults has handed us the remote control and headed to my
grandparents’ kitchen, where the coffeepot is gurgling and Grandma Mae is busying
herself filling cup after cup. Sherrie sits at the kitchen table as aunts and uncles seem to
sleepwalk around her. She is chattering hysterically. “I just can’t believe it, I don’t know
who could have done this.” My uncles stare at her with puffy, annoyed eyes.
The sliding-glass door slams. Grandpa Ben stands outside, wailing and kicking the
redwood deck with his short, strong legs. Every pound against the wood makes me
cringe. I’m staring at the television, but I’m telepathically begging Grandpa Ben to wipe
his foxlike eyes, smooth his dirty-blond hair, and stroll back inside. His whimpers fall
silent, but the door does not open.
Bobby and I stay focused on the fishing. Two men sit on a dull, flat lake whispering,
waiting for the big one to bite. For the sake of distraction, for the sake of fear, it is the
most engrossing program Bobby and I have ever seen. We made it back to the house first,
in Grandma’s car. Bobby headed directly to the message board next to the kitchen
telephone and scrawled “CREMATED 6/22/86” in chalk. I watched, puzzled, not
knowing what cremated meant and not believing Bobby could use the word so
confidently. I’d never felt a kinship with Bobby. His father, Dad had told me, was a bad
man. I was brash, outspoken, full of myself; Bobby tended to mumble and communicate
in nervous giggles, with wary eyes. Yet, except for that weird remark about the shaving
accident, Bobby had shown admirable control during those last two hours at the house
and the hospital.
When the knock comes at the front door, I know it’s my mom, because only she, the
perpetually paranoid ex-wife, would knock. She crouches in the foyer and hugs me,
braces my shoulders, makeup-free face twisting with worry. I feel as if I’ve just been
released from a torture camp in which I’d been next in line for the firing squad, but my
joy in finally seeing her, in finally heading to our home far, far down the freeway in
Fresno, is muted. I look her in the eye.
“Someone killed my dad,” I tell her. “But I’m OK.”
This is what I say to her, verbatim. I know it now for fact because she never forgets
it.
The Fallout
Four days after my father’s murder, Grandma Mae, Sherrie, Bobby, and I sat on the
Merced County Sheriff’s Department steps, waiting for the detectives to send us on our
way. Bobby and I had just been fingerprinted. A current of excitement had rippled
through me as the lieutenant firmly rolled each of my fingers on the ink pad, followed by
a wave of guilt as I remembered that my father was dead, that it was only because of his
murder that I was feeling like a guest star on The Rockford Files. I would get
used to this seesaw sensation over the next few months-a moment of normality, of
laughing at my favorite cartoon or delighting in the teddy bear my aunt in Oregon had
sent as a condolence gift. And then that jolt of memory, of registering anew a fact that
had not yet become a given of my existence-Dad would never watch Inspector
Gadget with me again; my aunt had sent the bear because my father was dead.
Grandma Mae’s salt-and-pepper bob had turned noticeably grayer overnight. The
outside corner of her right eye twitched above her deepening jowls. I repositioned myself,
tugging at my culottes to cover as much skin as possible-the afternoon was so hot that
the concrete baked my backside, even though a breeze blew down the sidewalk. The wind
picked up a pile of dead leaves and tossed them into a tiny whirlwind that swept toward
us. Sherrie took a deep drag on her cigarette, peering at the miniature tornado with that
thoughtful smoker expression. “Stan always said that when he died, he’d like to come
back as the wind,” she said with a wistful smile.
My own right eye began to twitch. It struck me that what Sherrie said wasn’t true.
Just a few weeks ago Sherrie, Bobby, and I had all lain together in Dad’s bed one late
morning, cuddling as he sipped his coffee, musing on the concept of reincarnation. I said
I wanted to return as a rabbit, and Dad said he wanted to come back as an eagle, soaring
above the mountains.
I let Sherrie’s seeming lie wash over me, like so many things that Sherrie had said in
the year and a half since she’d entered my life. I’d given up trying to read her motivations
long ago. Just before her marriage to my dad, a year earlier, she’d taken me alone to the
mall for “girl shopping.” She’d hovered over a bin in the Mervyn’s lingerie department,
dangling discounted thong panties from her skinny fingers and purring, “Your father’s
going to love this!” Was I supposed to enjoy being in on her grown-up seduction?
Was she trying to make clear the sexual powers she held over my dad? My face tingled
with shame, but my head shook up and down as though she’d offered me a piece of
candy, because it was the only way I knew to get through.
All of us were just getting through during those days after the murder, which is why I
was sitting at the Sheriff’s Department with Sherrie in the first place. I’d spent the first
day after the murder in Fresno with my mother, but Grandma Mae requested that I stay
with her and Grandpa Ben after the funeral. Sherrie and Bobby had moved into my
grandparents’ extra bedroom. Unbeknownst to my mother, Sherrie’s sworn enemy, I was
left not in my grandparents’ constant care, but in Sherrie’s charge. And so, the day after
the Sheriff’s Department visit, Sherrie dropped Bobby and me off at a city-run child-care
program in Applegate Park and came back for us late that afternoon.
We drove past downtown’s vacuum-repair shops and boarded-up cafés, past the
vintage movie theater with its peeling orange trim, past the fairgrounds, past the cemetery
where Dad’s ashes had just been laid to rest. Beyond the freeway overpass, Bobby and I
knew the route by heart. No other destination was possible. We were going back to the
house, our house, where Dad was killed.
“I’ve gotta run inside and get some things,” Sherrie said as she pulled into the
driveway, as though stopping off at Long’s for toothpaste and deodorant. She turned the
key, set the parking brake. “Come on, guys,” she said.
She took quick strides up the walkway while Bobby and I dragged our feet behind.
We stopped in the hallway, where the harsh summer light glared upon a trail of
blood.
“I guess we’ll have to get new carpet before we put the place on the market,” Sherrie
said with mystifying levelheadedness. She tiptoed around the blood spots, pussyfooting
along the wall to the back bedroom. Bobby looked ready to pick his nose, his nervous tic.
I grabbed his arm, pulled him into my bedroom, and shut the door.
My bedcovers lay unmade, just as I had left them, and the dresser drawers sat open,
clothes tossed around like tissue paper. Just to make believe this was a normal trip home,
I picked out some shorts and T-shirts and began folding them. Bobby sat in the corner
next to my trunk of stuffed animals bobbing Ralph the Muppet up and down in
conversation with Arthur the Cabbage Patch Kid. “Mommy’s going to sell the house,” he
said in a ventriloquist’s squeaky voice, nodding Arthur’s plastic head. “Yes, and then
we’ll never come back here again,” he huffed, snapping Ralph’s mouth open and
shut.
There was a soft knock at the door. “You guys ready?” Sherrie said. She had a
backpack over one shoulder, and an overnight case in her hand. Bobby and I followed her
out of the bedroom and around the blood, not bothering to take anything with us, not
knowing if we’d ever come back.
On June 23, 1986, the headline “Merced Man Stabbed To Death” appeared on the
third page of the Merced Sun-Star, beneath a puff piece about locals auditioning
for the new Fresno miniseries. Merced County sheriff’s officers are
investigating the stabbing death of Stanley Howard, 32, who died early Sunday.
Sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Hector Garibay said Sunday no suspects had been arrested in the
case.
While Sherrie and Bobby and I were revisiting the crime scene, articles about Dad’s
murder that I was not shown, that I would not see for nearly two decades, were running in
the Merced and Fresno papers. News spots about the case I would never view were
playing on the local television stations. The story had the makings of a gripping
chronicle: The murder was bizarre even for an agricultural town of sixty thousand despite
Merced County’s high crime rate-a dozen people were murdered there the year Dad
died. And yet the story would quickly disappear, because within a week it would be
obvious that the case was going nowhere.
I overheard certain details in those days right after his death, a word dropped by
Sherrie, a whisper from someone I didn’t even recognize at the funeral reception. Some
of these details stuck in my memory. Others I didn’t learn until more than fifteen years
later, so that it would become difficult for me to sort what I knew then from what I
gathered as an adult.
The detectives decided that whoever killed my father had been expert in his
operation: He’d stabbed Dad’s carotid artery and twisted the knife, breaking the blade off
inside his neck. They had a psychologist interview Bobby, who talked of half-waking to
see a shadowy figure in his bedroom doorway. They analyzed a hair that had been found
in the house and failed to connect it to anybody. They dusted the house for prints but
found only the family’s finger smudges and a stray print from one of the detectives.
They canvassed the neighborhood and questioned Dad’s friends and acquaintances in
hopes of identifying someone, anyone, with a reason to want Dad dead. Names were
swiftly checked off the list of possible suspects: The owner of a van that had been sighted
parked near our house had a strong alibi; a man spotted walking down a road near our
home with blood on his hand had buddies vouch that he’d been in a fight, and that he’d
been returning from a late night out. One final suspect-Sherrie’s own brother-was
cleared just as quickly and mysteriously.
But my family was silently beginning to form its own suspicions. The process began
the moment Grandma Mae called my mother at four thirty a.m. to tell her my father was
dead, with my mother’s gut response: “Did Sherrie do this?”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Lost Night
by Rachel Howard
Copyright © 2005 by Rachel Howard.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Dutton
Copyright © 2005
Rachel Howard
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-525-94862-7
