“I better not,” he murmured.

“Was it your idea?”

“Heck no, not me. You probably think I’m a jerk. I was stupid to go along with it…I can see that now …but at the time I just wanted to get out. I was desperate. You ever been in juvie?”

I shook my head.

“You’re lucky.”

I said, “Whose idea was it?”

He gave me a direct look, his blue eyes as clear as a swimming pool. “It was Earnesto came up with it.”

“Were you pretty good friends?”

“No way! I only knew ‘em because we were all in the same cottage at Connaught. That guy, Julio, said he’d kill me if I didn’t help. I wasn’t going to do it. I mean, I didn’t want to go along with it, but he was big …real big guy …and he said he’d mess me up bad.”

“He threatened you.”

“Yeah, he said him and Ricardo would turn me out.”

“Meaning sexual abuse.”

“The worst,” he said.

“Why you?”

“Why me?”

“Yeah. What made you so valuable to the enterprise? Why not another Hispanic if they were headed into Mexico?”

He shrugged. “Those guys are twisted. Who knows how they think?”

“What were you planning to do down in Mexico if you didn’t speak the language?”

“Bum around. Hide. Cross back into Texas. Mostly I just wanted to get out of California. Court system here is not exactly on my side.”

The jail officer knocked, indicating time was up.

Something about Brian’s smile had already caused me to disconnect. I’m a liar by nature, a modest talent of mine, but one I cultivate. I probably know more about bullshit than half the people on the planet. If this kid was telling the truth, I didn’t think he’d sound nearly so sincere.

14

On the way back to the office, I stopped off at the Hall of Records, which is located in one wing of the Santa Teresa Courthouse. The courthouse itself was reconstructed in the late 1920s after the 1925 earthquake destroyed the existing courthouse as well as a number of commercial buildings downtown. Hammered copper plates on the doors to the Hall of Records depict an allegorical history of the state of California. I pushed through the entrance doors into a large space, dissected by a counter. To the right, a small reception area was furnished by two heavy oak tables with matching leather chairs. The floors were tiled in polished dark red paving stones, the high ceilings painted with faded blue-and-gold designs. Thick beams bore the echo of the repetitive patterns. Graceful wooden columns were visible at intervals, topped with Ionic capitals, again painted in muted hues. The windows were arched, the leaded-glass panes pierced with rows of linked circles. The actual work of the department was accomplished with the aid of technology: action stations, telephones, computers, microfilm projectors. As a further concession to the present, sections of the walls had been paneled with the soundproofing equivalent of pegboard.

I kept my mind blank, struggling with a curious resistance to the piece of digging I was about to do. There were several people at the counter, and for one brief moment I considered postponing the chore until some other day. Then another clerk appeared, a tall, lean fellow in slacks and a short-sleeved dress shirt, wearing a pair of glasses with one opaque lens. “Help you?”

“I’d like to check your records for a marriage license issued in November of 1935.”

“The name?” he asked.

“Millhone, Terrence Randall. Do you need her name as well?”

He made a note. “This will do.”

He pushed a form across the counter, and I filled in the blanks, reassuring the county about my purposes in asking. It was a silly formality in my opinion since births, deaths, marriages, and property recordings are a matter of public record. The filing system in use was called Soundex, a curious process whereby the vowels in the last name are eliminated altogether and consonants are awarded various numerical values. The clerk helped me convert the name Millhone to its Soundex equivalent, and then he sent me over to an old-fashioned card catalog where I found my parents listed, along with the date of their marriage, and the book and page numbers of the volume where the license was recorded. I returned to the counter with the information in hand. The clerk made a call to some web-footed creature in the bowels of the building, whose job it was to conjure up the relevant records consigned to cassettes.

The clerk sat me down at the microfilm machine, rattling off a rapid series of instructions, half of which I missed. It didn’t matter much, as he proceeded to turn the machine on and insert the cassette while he was telling me how to do it. Finally he left me to fast-forward my way through the bulk of the reel to the document in question. Suddenly, there they were—names and incidental personal data neatly entered into a record nearly fifty years old. Terrence Randall Millhone of Santa Teresa, California, and Rita Cynthia Kinsey of Lompoc, California, had married on November 18, 1935. He was thirty-three years old at the time of the wedding and listed his occupation as mail carrier. His father’s name was Quillen Millhone. His mother’s maiden name was Dace. Rita Kinsey was eighteen at the time of her marriage, occupation unlisted, daughter of Burton Kinsey and Cornelia Straith LaGrand. They were married by a Judge Stone of the Perdido Court of Appeal in a ceremony that took place in Santa Teresa at four in the afternoon. The witness who signed the form was Virginia Kinsey, my aunt Gin. So there they were, those three, standing together in the public register, not knowing that in twenty years husband and wife would be gone. As far as I knew there were no photographs of the wedding, no mementos of any kind. I’d seen only one or two pictures taken of them in later years. Somewhere I had a handful of snapshots of my babyhood and early childhood, but there were none of their respective families. I realized what a vacuum I’d been living in. Where other people had anecdotes, photograph albums, correspondence, family gatherings, all the trappings of family tradition, I had little or nothing to report. The notion of my mother’s family, the Burton Kinseys, still residing up in Lompoc conjured up curious emotional contradictions. And what of my father’s people? I’d never heard any mention of the Millhones at all.