Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(78)

I forced myself to smile. “No! Not at all. But right now, I think I should be alone.”



* * *



I walked the two miles back home from the Berkeley campus, still wrapped up in my thoughts. That was the problem with memories. They could be disobedient. Once allowed out they didn’t always retreat on command. At the time of the killings, Jordan Stone had been only seventeen, a high school senior. Peters was a few years older, a dropout with a string of arrests. Their plan had been a series of home robberies and then Mexico. As though they could go door to door robbing homes and end up with enough to retire. They’d broken into two homes before ours. The occupants had been lucky. They hadn’t been home. Our house had been third. My mom had answered the door. They told her their car was broken down. She probably would have offered them fresh-baked cookies while they waited for the tow truck. According to Jordan Stone’s testimony, it was Peters who insisted there be no witnesses. The cops got them two days later, down in Salinas, trying to hold up a gas station with a baseball bat and a meat cleaver. The entire spree had netted them a stolen car, some jewelry and cash, and a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos that Jordan Stone had taken from the gas station.

In return they had left an injured gas station clerk, some damaged property, and my dead parents.

The Surf Town Slaughter, the papers had called the crime. A high-powered San Francisco lawyer volunteered to defend Jordan Stone pro bono, the free media attention worth more than any fees. Almost overnight he worked out a plea bargain and a new narrative. A naive, susceptible kid who’d fallen under the Manson-like influence of the older man. They both looked the part. A cheap shirt and tie couldn’t hide the ominous tattoos across the neck of Carson Peters, his menacing eyes and shaved head. He had been sentenced to death, which in California meant life. He currently occupied a comfortable single cell in San Quentin, at a cost to taxpayers of about $150,000 a year.

Jordan Stone looked like a scared teenager. Blond bangs falling over his forehead, blue eyes welling with tears. No prior arrests, a bright future, one mistake. He had been a star athlete on his school’s track team. At the trial, his line of character witnesses stretched around the block, everyone from ex-girlfriends to his AP U.S. History teacher. His parents and siblings—who all still happened to be alive—told emotional stories about his generosity and kindness.

The trial taught me that people liked clear roles. Liked to see other people—strangers—and think they knew them. After the trial Peters went off to death row and settled into an endless round of appeals. Jordan Stone pled guilty to manslaughter, went off to juvenile detention, turned eighteen, and was transferred to state prison where he got his GED, attended chapel, tutored other inmates.

He did everything one would expect from a person seeking rehabilitation.

He had been a model prisoner, the parole board would unanimously agree.



* * *



After the trial, I was bounced around for a couple of years, from a tough state home to foster parents who I still tried hard not to think about. Eventually I wound up in Davis with a second set of foster parents, Elizabeth and Jeff Hammond. I arrived expecting the worst, but the Hammonds were different. She was a librarian, and every day that summer I walked to her library to read. The library was a modest, one-story building and soon it felt closer to home than anything I’d had in a long time. The smell of dry paper and bindings, the fresh ink and cedar of the newspaper rack, the sunlight that poured through the windows in the reading room and bounced dust motes around in a languid, silent dance. That feeling of wandering alone between high shelves, the outside world forgotten, neck craned sideways to better make out titles dim against dark hardcover spines, feeling with each step the pleasure of a solitarian mixed with a pioneer’s fascination at a new discovery.

That summer, the last before high school, was spent almost entirely in the library. I reread all the classic children’s books: the Little House on the Prairie series, The Secret Garden, Little Women, Black Beauty. I read The Swiss Family Robinson, wondering why there was no daughter, and pictured my own family, marooned on some island somewhere, out of my reach forever. Then Island of the Blue Dolphins, imagining myself on some similar island, again alone. I found James and the Giant Peach, poring over the beginning again and again—parents slaughtered by a rampaging rhinoceros, alive one moment, brutally dead the next, a small boy sent to live with the two horrible aunts, beaten and abused before being freed to explore the world. I spent hours paging through From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, raptly imagining myself as Claudia Kincaid, running off to New York with my brother and hiding out together.

I found my way to the adult section and read dozens and dozens more books, cutting eagerly across time zones and time periods. I never talked to anyone by choice. I disliked when library patrons commented on my concentration or the impressive thickness of the book I held, like I was a dog that had dug up an especially sizeable bone. Talking made me uncomfortable. Strangers made me uncomfortable. Grown-ups made me uncomfortable. I hated feeling looked at or noticed and so I made a habit of taking the books away from the comfortable armchairs of the reading room, preferring to sit on the thin carpeting in a corner, away from everyone.

At that point in my life I only trusted books. Nothing else, no one else. Not even myself.

One type of book drew me more than any other. I read Wuthering Heights, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Count of Monte Cristo, Carrie. Even then I was thinking about people who were wronged and people who did wrong. Even then I was wondering if wanting to do bad things to bad people made me the same as them, and if I cared. Even then I was thinking about Carson Peters and Jordan Stone. About the people in the books I read, and the many more people who must be out there in the world, planning evil. Hating the fact that I was a gangly teenager who had never saved anyone.