Kyle was paddling a few yards behind the main raft when the current, more like a series of small eddies, intensified.
Still not enough to make anyone alarmed, only enough to keep an eye out. Kyle suddenly seemed to be having a little trouble steering. No one paid much attention. There was no danger. Sherwood had been telling his war stories to one of the other couples, a stockbroker and his wife from Seattle. The guide even broke out the cold drinks.
Then Kyle called out.
For the first time Sherwood saw that his son was afraid.
“Mom,” he called out, struggling. “Dad!”
“Keep it steady, son!” Sherwood called.
If the boy had just been twelve, even a little larger, it would have been nothing. The current was barely more than a trickle.
But a hundred yards downstream, the river divided. There was a sliver of an island in the middle separating the two sides. No more than a couple of hundred yards long. Everyone watched with elevating concern as Kyle got himself caught in a midstream current and was drawn, against his increasing attempts to right himself, to the other side.
Dorrie became alarmed. “
That was when Sherwood took off his sneaks and went to jump in. But the guide held him back. They were too far along.
“He’ll be okay,” the guide said, trying to reassure him. “There’s nothing dangerous over there.” He signaled to the other raft. “We’ll meet up with him on the other side.”
Sherwood yelled out. “You’ll be okay! Just paddle, son!”
But his heart told him something entirely different.
Back outside Charlie’s apartment, Sherwood gazed out at the darkened courtyard. He turned on the radio. Something easy and soothing. Country. Annoyed at himself.
Why did he have to go through this now?
It was called a strainer-a thatch of branches just below the surface.
And the sound of that word still brought him anguish and pain, though it had been almost twenty years.
They steered the main raft to the far end of the island and waited for Kyle to make his way out.
Everyone was shouting, “
He never did.
Sherwood finally jumped in. Panicked. Running ahead of the guide. Thrashing against the current upstream. The river was no more than thigh high and seemingly smooth, but after running hard a hundred yards Sherwood’s thighs began to tire and feel like concrete, a steady stream of water pushing against them. “
The second hundred yards lasted a lifetime. All the power in his legs simply gave way. They turned to fire and then to rubber, and he had to stop, the guide running past him.
Up ahead, he saw the guide kneel in the water, freeing his boy from the brambles that had caught on his life jacket, under the surface. He gazed back with a look Sherwood would never forget, crying out, “
He snuggled in the car seat in a comfortable position and took out a burrito from a bag and settled in. He turned up the volume.
Behind the shades in the apartment, the light had gone off.
Chapter Fifty-Four
That night, I fell asleep while paging through Greenway’s book.
I woke up a couple of hours later. The digital clock read 2:17 A.M. I climbed out of bed, poured myself a glass of water. I checked my e-mails, flicked on the TV.
My brain seemed to be repeating the same question over and over.
I lay on the bed, suddenly hearing noises everywhere: a car passing by. Two late-night guests returning to their room. The low drone of the TV. I turned on the light again and picked up my book. Skimmed through a few pages at random, through the photos of the major participants, the ranch as it was back then, the police shots of the gruesome crime scene and evidence. I was hoping Greenway’s painstaking detail of the investigation would lull me back to sleep.
It didn’t take long after Riorden’s sister, Marci, was informed of her brother’s murder for attention to fall on his ex-wife, Sandy, and the “bunch of loonies” she was tied to.
Some of the threats Houvnanian had made against Riorden had found their way to the Santa Barbara police. A local gas station attendant remembered seeing “a van full of hippies” similar in appearance to Houvnanian and his group filling up at his station, only a couple of miles from the Riordens’ house earlier that day.
Houvnanian was brought in for questioning by local police. He was held on minor trespassing charges while police searched the premises. A few of his followers were brought in on misdemeanor narcotics possession, as small amounts of marijuana and hash were discovered.
While their leader was in custody, several other inhabitants of the ranch seemed eager to talk, and a picture began to emerge of the hallucinogenic frenzy that had stoked up their leader’s rage and paranoia.
My eyes began to feel heavy, but I pushed on.
Walter Zorn had handled a bunch of the early interviews with some of the ranch’s residents. I flipped ahead, ready to put the book down, as the clock neared three.
One of the people Zorn interviewed was a blond twenty-year-old runaway known as Katya. It wasn’t her real name.
Described as blond, pretty, with an affable, upbeat demeanor, it was Katya, Greenway claimed, who first gave up the names of the others who had abetted the perpetrators, among them Alex Fever and Susan Pollack, and she told the police that five others, Telford Richards, Sarah Strasser, Nolan Pierce, Carla Jean Blue, and Houvnanian “had gotten into the van early on the morning of the murders and didn’t come back until noon the next day.” She said, “It was clear to all of us something bad had happened.”
Another one who talked was Katya’s boyfriend, identified only as Chase, a nervous, long-haired musician who had dropped out of college back east.
Zorn suggested it was Chase who first led him and Joe Cooley to a marshy pond on the property where a bandana and a bloody poncho that were eventually tied to the killings were found.
And a day later, two knives with matching blood residue on them.
As the evidence tying Houvnanian, Richards, Blue, Pierce, and Strasser directly to the murder scene mounted,
