Just past ten o’clock one fall morning, when the leaves on the alder trees had started to turn yellow and shadows had begun to fall longer on the ground, Bob Hamilton rocketed down the Avenue of the Giants. The trees and river passed by in a foggy green blur. He hung a hard left onto Phillipsville Road, the same road he had raced down a few months earlier in search of the fugitive Keith Conn. This time he shot past the beat-up Airstream where he once thought Conn was hiding out and swung a right, toward a house filled with sadness.
A woman had died. She’d had lupus, Bob was told, and was under a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order so she could die from natural causes. Normally, Bob wouldn’t have responded to a call about someone under such an order, but the deceased woman’s daughter had called him on his cell phone a few minutes earlier and told him she suspected that drugs might be involved. Not only was Humboldt County home to nearly half of the planet’s remaining old-growth redwoods and the longest undeveloped stretch of coastline in California, but in 2010, Humboldt also had the distinction of having the state’s highest drug-induced death rate. Of course none of these deaths was due to marijuana, which no one has ever died from overdosing on. But like many poor, rural counties, Humboldt had a high rate of death from methadone, methamphetamine, and prescription drugs such as Vicodin and Oxycontin.
Bob pulled to a stop in front of a two-story house with a sagging front porch. The young woman who had called him was waiting by the side of the road. She had long brown hair and was dressed in the kind of clothes you throw on when you’re awoken by a phone call with bad news: a hoodie, sweat pants, and Ugg boots. In her arms she held a small blond boy in Space Invader pajamas. A man in a baseball cap hovered protectively nearby. The woman’s face was tearstained, and her voice cracked as she greeted Bob.
“I want to know if drugs were involved and if she OD’d on something,” she said. “I want to know if she did it herself or not…”
The woman’s voice trailed off and she began to weep. The man standing next to her wrapped his arm around her shoulder, and an older woman appeared out of nowhere to scoop the child out of her arms.
Bob had met the couple once before, in an enormous greenhouse full of pot. The little boy was just a baby then. They didn’t have a 215, so it was an illegal grow. The couple told Bob that they were trying to get money to build a house. He arrested the man, but only cited the woman because of the baby in her arms. Even though they had been busted, something about Bob’s interaction with the couple must have earned him their respect, because when the woman learned her mother had died, she called Bob almost immediately.
Bob pulled a small notebook and a pen out of his front pocket and began his police work. The young woman was named Kayla. She was twenty-two. Her mother, the deceased, was Christina. She was born in December 1964, and had died that morning in the room she rented in a house a few feet from where they were standing. For much of her life, Christina had battled heroin addiction.
Bob turned toward the house. It was large and rambling, and overlooked the South Fork of the Eel River in the back. Like most places in Phillipsville, it looked as though its heyday had been back around the time of the logging boom. Bob stepped into the front yard and realized that he had been there before. He had once kicked down the front gate while chasing a suspect.
In the hallway inside, a skinny woman with blond hair and the raspy voice of someone who smoked too many cigarettes was speaking to a woman who turned out to be the deceased’s sister. The blonde’s name was Cinderella, but everybody called her Cindra.
Bob glanced around the corner to the kitchen and an enormous living room beyond. Oriental carpets covered the floors, along with four overstuffed couches and a pool table. The place smelled musty, as if no one had opened the windows in a very long time.
“How long has she lived here?” he asked.
“I’m guessing six months,” said Cindra. “Some days she was pretty decent; other days she was in so much pain she couldn’t move.”
A man with long white hair and a white beard, who looked a little bit like Gandalf the Grey, passed by. His name was Steven and he owned the house. Steven was barefoot, and seemed oblivious to the chill in the air in shorts and a T-shirt. He appeared disturbed by the morning’s events and unable to stop pacing. Bob had heard of Steven before but couldn’t remember why. It wouldn’t be long before he heard about Steven again. In retrospect, all Steven’s pacing that morning might have been simple discomfort at having Bob poking about his house.
In the kitchen, next to a garbage can full of empty liquor bottles and a sliding glass door that looked out onto the swollen river outside, Bob learned the story of Christina’s death from the man who had found her. Ron rented the bedroom across the hall. He had buzzed white hair, and his eyes were wet with tears.
As Bob scribbled the story in his tiny notebook, Ron explained that the previous day had been a bad one for Christina. The chronic inflammation associated with lupus had made her hands ache, and her caregiver had tried to soothe the pain with an injection in her back.
At around 8:30 that morning, Ron went to check on Christina and was greeted by an eerie stillness.
“I could tell from the second I opened the door she was gone,” Ron said.
Out on the front porch, Kayla, Christina’s daughter, was crying.
“I’m sorry for overreacting,” she said as Bob walked up to her. He gently wrapped his arm around her shoulder.
“You’re not overreacting,” he told her. “Your mom passed away.”
After interviewing Cindra, the only person left to see was Christina herself. Her bedroom was located in an alcove at the top of the stairs. She was lying on a double bed that was pushed up against the window. Bob peeled back the red-and-white-check afghan that covered her. Christina had dark hair and pale, waxy skin. She looked gaunt, and her jaw was frozen open. As he peered down at her, Bob realized that, like the house and so many of the people in it, he had history with Christina, too. She had sold heroin out of a place she used to rent in Redway. Bob quietly pulled the afghan back over her head.
The night table next to her was littered with prescription pill bottles. Bob glanced at their labels. There were enough little orange bottles to fill a paper grocery bag. On the windowsill above the bed was a framed photograph of an attractive young woman in her thirties, with a young girl seated next to her. It was Christina and Kayla in happier times.
Downstairs, on one of the overstuffed couches in the living room, Bob delivered his findings to Kayla.
“There’s no reason for me to believe there was any foul play,” he told her. “I just wanted you to know what I came up with and that I’m really sorry for your loss.”
Upstairs, Bob gathered up a box of jewelry, Christina’s purse, cell phone, and a few other personal effects for Kayla. Kayla’s husband grabbed the framed portrait above the bed.
“One of the saddest things when my mom died is that I had nothing of hers,” Bob said as he handed the things over, and remembered the death of his own mother in a fire all those years ago.
“If you need me, call me,” he told Kayla as he walked out the door. Employees from a funeral home in Fortuna were on their way to collect the body.
“Thanks, Hamilton.”
Bob rubbed sanitizer over his hands as he drove away. Deathwise, it was all very short and sweet. On the drive back toward 101, yellow alder leaves were scattered across the roadway in front of him. Later on during his patrol that day, Bob’s mind would wander to the less sweet stories from his years in law enforcement and the things he’d seen that would forever haunt him, like the five-year-old boy who was accidentally shot and killed by his father on a hunting trip. Bob had had to scoop the lifeless child out of the car that day, and he would never forget how his tiny body felt like a bag of chicken bones and Jell-O in his arms.
Then there was the nine-year-old girl he hit after she Rollerbladed out in front of his squad car one evening in Fresno. After a brief hospital stay, she ended up being fine, but Bob was so distraught by the guilt and the memory of the girl crumpling to the ground in front of his car that he had to take time off from work.
More recently, a Humboldt woman out in Whitethorn had tried to take her life in a particularly horrific way. She was wielding a butcher knife when Bob arrived at her house. Her response to his command to drop it was to race into a bedroom and lock the door. After hearing strange gurgling sounds coming from the other side of the door, Bob kicked the door down and discovered the woman had slit her throat. She then tried to fight him off as Bob applied pressure to her wounds with his bare hands. There was so much blood his sleeves were soaked up to his elbows. Bob later received life-saving awards from both the Red Cross and the Sheriff’s Department for his actions. The woman lived, thanks to him, but would go on to attempt suicide again.
After all he had seen, it was no wonder to Bob that police officers had such a high rate of suicide, almost twice that of the general population. He kept his spirits up with high-adrenaline hobbies, like flying tiny planes, riding motorcycles, and skydiving.
* * *
Not long after his visit to the house in Phillipsville, Bob heard that Steven, the sixty-four-year-old homeowner, had been arrested. His wizard-like mug shot even made the front page of the local paper. It turned out that a concealed trap door in the house led to a basement where, under blazing lights, Steven and a couple of partners grew more than 3,300 marijuana plants, most of which were tiny clones.
Bob wasn’t even that surprised when he heard the news. He figured the guy would get off on probation. It just seemed to Bob like everyone got off on probation these days. To him, there was just no accountability and no incentive not to grow pot in Humboldt County. The district attorney, Paul Gallegos, had even attended a fund-raiser sponsored by the Humboldt Growers Association. If that wasn’t condoning pot growing, Bob didn’t know what was. He felt like he was pointlessly fighting the tide. The way he saw it, as long as there was a black market somewhere, the issues of criminality associated with the marijuana industry would continue. The only way it was ever going to change was to legalize it. The laws were already in place, he figured; just treat it like alcohol. You aren’t allowed to come to work drunk, so you aren’t allowed to come to work stoned. You don’t drive drunk, you don’t drive stoned. Legalize pot, tax it, and enforce laws pertaining to it. To Bob, it seemed like the only answer.