Miranda Sullivan coughed loudly.
Walter had been indulging in an uncharacteristic bout of daydreaming.
“I do apologise,” he smiled to Darlene Lefebure. “You mentioned that your, er, boyfriend, Dwayne John, was being held for crimes he allegedly committed against you?”
“The FBI said there was an Alabama State extradition warrant out for Dwayne.”
Walter Brenckmann turned to Miranda.
“Is there any such thing, Miss Sullivan?”
“I have no idea. I’m not a lawyer.” It was only after she had uttered the impatient put down that she realised what the Navy man had actually just asked her. “I’ll check it out with the California State Attorney General’s Office when I get back to Sacramento,” she promised, a little chastened.
“I’m sure that would help put Miss Lefebure’s mind partly at ease,” he said with the air of a man who has been done an enormous favour. “I’m not a lawyer either, of course. But it does seem to me that unless Miss Lefebure was prepared to voluntarily return to Alabama to testify against Mr John that the whole ‘extradition’ thing is somewhat academic?”
“You’re probably right. I’ll look into it.”
Darlene Lefebure’s eyes had darted from one face to the other, like a spectator watching a tennis match following the ball zinging from one side of the net to the other.
“I don’t like it here,” she blurted. “Can they keep me here?”
“I’ll check that out too with the State Attorney General’s Office,” Miranda assured her. Knowing this was no comfort to the other woman she dug in her handbag, pulled out a notebook and scrawled a number on it. She tore out the page. “If you don’t hear anything by this time tomorrow you can call that number. It is my office number. If I am not there you can leave a message.”
“You mean it?”
Miranda nodded.
“Yes,” she said simply, hardly believing that she actually meant it.
Chapter 20
Judy had fallen in love with Gretsky’s and Laurel Canyon at first sight. Much like the way she had with Sam Brenckmann, possibly because Gretsky’s, Laurel Canyon and Sam were so completely different to anything and anybody she had known before in her thirty-one years. Gretsky’s had felt like home from day one and not just because she and Sam had been on the road — on the run from something or other — for nearly three months by then. Sam had described Laurel Canyon, the ramshackle house, the sunshine and the people she would meet in Los Angeles to keep her spirits up; but being with him had been the thing that had kept her going. He said they had kept each other going but she had no illusions that but for Sam she would be dead now.
Judy shivered every time she remembered how unwilling she had been to get out of Bellingham. She had never really been anywhere else, she had visited Vancouver and Seattle a few times, otherwise Bellingham was all she knew and Bellingham people were the only people she knew of, or remotely understood. Sam, for all that he was six years her junior and in many ways a self-confessed air head, was infinitely less trusting of strangers and hugely more worldly wise.
Sam had taken one look at the people flocking into Bellingham in the days after the October War and said: ‘We have to get out of here, babe.’
The idea of leaving Bellingham had terrified Judy.
He had refused point blank to leave without her.
Judy felt cold all over every time she thought about that day they left; they had been among the last people to get out before the barricades blocked every road. The looting and the killing had begun by then.
The Canadians had closed the border to US citizens within a week of the war; if Sam had not coached her to claim to be a Canadian national trying to get home with her husband, and that they had been robbed on the road and lost all their documents, they would never have got across the border alive. That was just ten days after the war; within a few days it became clear the most of the members of Judy’s extended, somewhat distant family in the Fraser Valley around Chilliwack were dead or missing, and that a winter in a tented refugee camp in British Columbia was going to be a desperately miserable, likely unsurvivable trial. Again, it was Sam who had decided that they had to move on.
‘The longer we stay here the harder it will be to get out of Canada,’ he had said and this time she had not argued. Among the refugees in the camps along the US-Canadian border the mood was one of desperation, desolation and terrifying paranoia. They were all ‘on the beach’ waiting for the end of the World; disease was taking its first dreadful toll of the old, the young, the sick and the injured. Most of the injured with severe burns had died in the first weeks. Those blinded by airbursts who were without friends or family members or somebody who was prepared to reduce their own chances of survival to care for them, wandered the camps or lay on filthy camp beds waiting to die, wasting away. There was no scope in the camps for caring for strangers; it was all one could do to go on living; for Judy and Sam to look after each other, no matter how heart-breaking it was to see the suffering and death all around. Such was the reality of the homeless survivors of the American North-West.
Canadian ships attempting to get past the US Navy blockade needed to be ‘repatriating’ Americans. In those weeks after the war there was no talk of the United States allowing in the destitute and the starving unless it was solemnly obligated, and so Judy had become again a native of Washington State. There were no civilian flights south, they had tried and failed to get on one of the occasional US Air Force shuttles out of Vancouver to Portland. Eventually, they had camped out in the docks for nearly a fortnight before talking themselves onto a rusty steamer running down to Tacoma. The ship almost sank in a storm and took four days to make the short passage down the coast, and when at last they arrived there had been no welcome in the land of the free. At Tacoma Judy and Sam had been herded into a displaced persons camp; if they had allowed themselves to be separated they would probably never have seen each other again, such was the chaos, and such was the morbidity among the inmates of the South Seattle camps. They had become savages in that camp, ready to fight or run at a moment’s panic. Sam had smashed a man’s skull one night with a hammer; the man had been one of three attempting to rape Judy. He had probably killed that man, he had shattered a second man’s arm with a flurry of swinging blows, screaming like a madman before the third had finally backed away and together, she and Sam had found another place to hide in the darkness. They had never talked again of that night. Everybody they met on the road, everybody they spoke to had a nightmare tale of woe and regret, of friends and family lost, of the unending tragedy of the age.
Lately, their fraught little odyssey had become the source and inspiration for a slew of songs in Sam’s burgeoning self-penned repertoire as he plied the clubs and bars of the Sunset Strip. Their time on the run had been a living nightmare which by rights, they ought never to have survived. A woman alone would certainly not have survived.
Over a year after the war the mood of the times was both odd and contrary, Judy reflected. Once she and Sam had found safe haven at Gretsky’s and he had set about re-connecting with ‘the scene’, she had quickly got used to the otherness of life in the canyon, and almost overnight the loss and disaster of the October War had faded into her personal background. Sitting on the veranda of Gretsky’s with Sabrina while Sam picked strings and played with melodies, singing quietly in that unschooled, attention-grabbing way of his, she felt herself to be a different person, a stranger to the woman who until last fall had been obsessed with paying the mortgage to keep a home her husband — whom she had stopped loving years ago — was never coming back to. The California weather was a revelation; she adored wearing thin, lightweight flowing cotton dresses, and luxuriated in the dry wind and the warmth that seemed to permeate her northern soul. She was so used to the rain and the cold, and to the wintery sunshine of the North-West, that the cool of the hills overlooking West Hollywood was like some temperate Shangri-La, and the Canyon, a dream world.