My brother, my brother, my brother. What can an aging lesbian outlaw do if her brother is a white terrorist and he might still be alive? After Royce’s death, I had been sad but relieved. Twice before he had vanished and emerged transformed. When his marriage to a Charleston debutante ended while he was still in his early twenties, he disappeared for almost three years; then he reappeared in Mendocino, embracing Santane and fatherhood and trying to write that novel. The second time he disappeared, the FBI declared him armed and dangerous, then dead. Was it possible he would reemerge again?
Over the next two days I sat with his daughter while tides of rumors rose and fell around us. The white van with the dented front fender that Ruby claimed to have seen in the driveway had been spotted in Boulder, in Reno, in Denver, in Seattle. White separatists in Montana were brought in for questioning; other racists were being questioned in Idaho and Washington State. Yet no traces of the children had materialized.
Ruby said little and ate almost nothing, drinking cup after cup of water. “I can’t swallow food.” She refused pain medication and even the antibiotics prescribed as a result of her wound. Nor would she drink the concoctions Lightman’s mother kept offering. When Lightman introduced me to his mother, she acknowledged me with a harsh stare. Lightman said he was so exhausted at night he didn’t know whether or not Ruby slept. He was a sturdy, silent man who seemed indifferent to my presence. His need to search—and perhaps his increasing doubts about his wife—drove him from the house early each morning.
There was a great deal of pressure from the press and no one else took charge, so I stepped into an authority that has always come naturally to me. I became the family’s spokesperson, going out of the house several times to give short statements to a string of microphones and cameras, later trying to fend off a reporter at my hotel. “Ruby is doing as well as can be expected,” I kept saying, variously. “She is praying constantly for the return of her children.” I refused all questions about my brother—“My brother’s dead, that’s factual”—and even wrote a brief statement that Ruby agreed to read the second day, after which she contradicted me.
She spoke these words woodenly: “I ask the men who took Lucia and River to please to take good care of them and release them unharmed. I do not believe you are evil men, not in your deepest hearts. Lucia and River, your father and I love you more than anything, and we are waiting for you to come back.” Then she crushed the note and began to sob. “Daddy, please come help me. I know you’re listening.”
Profiles of the Silent Brotherhood and other white supremacist organizations from the 1980s, among them the Aryan Republican Army, the Posse Comitatus, the National Alliance, the CSA, and a group still living in a compound in Elohim City, Oklahoma, began to appear on TV. I called Estelle several times because I knew my mother could not be kept away from the screen, but she said Momma was delighted during the moments she recognized Royce. She thought he was part of the cast of The Young and the Restless, a soap opera she watched daily. When my own image appeared, she waved cheerfully and greeted me, untroubled by my lack of response.
I did not know what to make of the fact that Ed Blake already owned a hardcover copy of Royce’s novel, which overnight became nearly impossible to buy. The signed first edition I had brought for Ruby she left on the table and did not touch, except to turn it over once and gaze at Royce’s photo, bearded, long-haired, well-muscled from outdoor living, leaning against the doorframe of their Mendocino cabin with his arms crossed, his expression quietly somber.
“Do you remember when your father looked like that?”
“Sort of.” She was holding a child’s coloring book in her hands and slowly tearing off the corners of random pages.
“Do you remember living with him and your mother in Mendocino, next to the big redwoods?”
“No, but I remember Rommel.”
“You remember the German shepherd?”
The stack of paper triangles drifted off the sofa. “I remember when Daddy shot him.”
I said, stupidly, “Royce shot Rommel?”
But Ruby said nothing more for the rest of that day.
I had dinner with Ed Blake that evening, although I did not trust his motives in befriending me. We ate at his home because, he said, reporters were stalking both of us, and he was cautious about the new long-range microphones.
Blake turned out to be a decent cook, steaks and chops and salads with strong, unpretentious seasonings. He lived in a log cabin with a ceiling of varnished cedar—“built from a kit, don’t be impressed”—and showed me pictures of his daughters, who were, like him, tall, thickly made, and surprisingly good-looking.
“They look a lot like you.”
“Ha. Poor kids.”
“What happened to your marriage?”
“We wore it out,” he said. “And she met someone else.”
“You did too?”
He put the photographs back on the pine shelf. “Listen, Ellen Burns, the road to hell is paved with mistakes. Don’t misinterpret me asking you to have dinner out here.”
“Oh, please, I’m older than you, not to mention more jaded.”
“Actually, you’re two years younger. And jaded is kind of a pejorative word to use for people just because they’ve had real lives. I need somebody smart and knowledgeable to talk with about this situation, and there appears to be pressure on my friend at the FBI that hinders our frank communication. I think you and I might be able to help each other. Maybe it’s fortuitous that you’ve showed up.” He gestured past me toward the porch. “Let’s go outside now. I need to handle the chops and take that corn off the grill.”
I walked behind him and spoke into his shoulder. “We have different agendas, Ed Blake. I will admit I’m impressed by a cop who can use the word pejorative in a sentence. Not to mention fortuitous.” He wore a green cotton shirt and jeans and smelled faintly of aftershave lotion.
He held open the screen door and glanced down into my eyes. “Maybe some policemen are smarter than others. We both want to find Ruby’s children, don’t we?”
“Of course,” I said, stepping past him. “I want to help Ruby too. But I need to find out what has really happened to my brother, and my guess is you know a lot more about that situation than you’re going to tell me.”
He lifted the top of the grill, which rested on the red dirt yard below the porch. Growing grass seemed impossible out here. In downtown Charleston, grass was meticulously maintained. Blake was cooking with charcoal, and a cloud of pleasant aromas enveloped us. “I’ll tell you what I can,” he said, “if you’ll be straight with me about your brother.”
So, while eating pork chops the first night and porterhouse the second, he gave me new information about Royce and his friend, Joe Magnus, and I told him part of our family’s history.