فصل 05

5

Oak Park

I HEAR TERRY KEATING BEFORE I SEE HIM. HE WORKS AS A DRUMMER and drum teacher, and his booming voice is probably a result of either hearing loss or a habit of yelling at his students to be heard. “It’s Terry!” he shouts. I look up from my phone as I stand waiting for him and see a medium-size white guy with a flop of brown hair holding a Venti Starbucks cup. He’s wearing Levi’s and a green T-shirt that says SHAMROCK FOOTBALL. But he’s not talking to me. He’s crossing the street toward 143 South Wesley Avenue, the corner brick house in Oak Park, Illinois, where we have agreed to meet. He’s calling out to a man in his fifties working on a car in the driveway. The man is tall, lanky, slightly stooped, his once dark hair gone gray. He’s got what is sometimes unkindly referred to as a hatchet face. There is nothing warm about him.

But there’s something familiar. He bears a strong resemblance to the family who lived in the house when I was growing up; some of the kids were close to my age, and I knew them from around town. He must be an older brother, I realize, and either bought or inherited the house from his parents.

The man looks at Terry with no recognition. I see Terry is undeterred, and unease washes over me. I have a mother’s instinct to reach out, redirect, and quiet down. But I can see Terry wants to distinguish himself in the man’s memory. They are old neighbors after all.

“I’m one of the boys that found the body!” Terry shouts.

The man stares at Terry from the side of his car. He says nothing. The blankness is emphatically hostile. I look away, directing my gaze at a tiny Virgin Mary statue planted in the northeast corner of the front lawn.

It’s Saturday afternoon, June 29, 2013—an unusually cold and windy day for midsummer Chicago. In the sky, a block to the west, I can see the steeple of St. Edmund Catholic Church, my family’s old church, where I went to school from first through third grades.

The man returns to tinkering with his car. Terry peels off to the right. He spots me thirty yards down the sidewalk. I light up at eye contact and wave furiously at him, compensation for what just transpired. Terry was a year above me at St. Edmund’s. The last time I remember seeing him was thirty-five years ago. I know little about him aside from the recent discovery that the same night in August 1984 changed both our lives.

“Michelle!” he shouts, walking toward me. “How’s Hollywood?”

We hug awkwardly. His manner brings me back immediately to the Oak Park of my childhood. The flat vowels in his thick Chicago accent. The way he announces later that he has to “haul ass.” He’s got a cowlick, a raw, pink color to his cheeks, and an utter lack of artifice. No calculating mechanism filters his thought from speech. He starts in right away.

“So yeah, what happened was,” he says, leading me back toward the house. I hesitate. Maybe it’s fear of the already unhappy homeowner’s reaction. Maybe it’s my sense that walking might help transport us to that muggy summer night when we still rode bikes but had tasted our first sip of beer.

I look south down the alley.

“How about we retrace the path you guys took that night?”

Oak Park borders the West Side of Chicago. Ernest Hemingway, who grew up there, famously referred to it as a town of “wide lawns and narrow minds,” but that wasn’t my experience of the place. We lived in a drafty three-story Victorian on the 300 block of South Scoville, a cul-de-sac in the center of town. North of us was the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio and an affluent neighborhood of prairie homes and liberal professionals intent on staying hip. My friend Cameron lived in one of the Wright homes. Her stepfather was a civil rights attorney, and her mother was, I think, a potter. They introduced me to vegetarian salt and the word “Kabuki.” I remember the stepfather recommending that Cameron and I, who both tended toward black smocks and confessional verse, cheer ourselves up by going to see the Talking Heads’ concert movie Stop Making Sense.

South of us was mostly blue-collar Irish Catholic families. The houses were always a few degrees too cold and the beds lacked headboards. Occasionally a father would disappear with a twenty-year-old, never to be seen again, but there would be no divorce. A college friend who spent sophomore year spring break with my family was convinced that my father was doing a comedy bit when he began updating me on the local gossip. The last names, she said, were so exclusively, defiantly Irish. The Connellys. The Flannerys. The O’Learys. And on and on. I overheard a weary Irish Catholic mother from Oak Park field a question about my family once. “How many McNamara kids are there?” she was asked.

“Only six,” she said. She had eleven.

My family had a foot in both sides of Oak Park. My parents were natives, members of the tribe commonly referred to as West Side Irish. They met in high school. My father was gap-toothed and jolly. He liked to laugh. My mother was the teetotaling eldest daughter of two hard partiers. She loved Judy Garland and had a lifelong fascination with Hollywood. “People used to tell me I resemble Gene Tierney,” she told me shyly once. I didn’t know who that was. When I saw Laura years later, the mysterious central character who shared my mother’s cascade of golden-flecked brown hair and delicately cut cheekbones mesmerized me.

The story is that my parents got together when my father knocked on my mother’s door looking, allegedly, for a friend of his. I believe it. The indirect approach to emotional matters suited them. They both had enormous eyes, my father’s blue, my mother’s green, that expressed with great feeling what they frequently could not.

My father briefly considered the seminary while away at Notre Dame. They called him Brother Leo. My mother considered other suitors and doodled alternate possibilities of her future last name. But Brother Leo decided the seminarians didn’t drink enough. Their friend, Rev. Malachy Dooley, officiated their wedding the day after Christmas, 1955. My eldest sister, Margo, was born the following September. Tease my mother with a raised eyebrow about the math and her cheeks burned. Her nickname in high school was Goody Two-Shoes.

After Northwestern Law School, my father went to work for the firm Jenner and Block downtown. He stayed thirty-eight years. Most days began for him in a chair on our screened-in front porch, one hand holding the Chicago Tribune, the other a cup of tea, and ended with a very dry Beefeater martini on the rocks with a twist. When he decided to get sober, in 1990, he announced the news in his usual quirky way. Each child received a typewritten form letter. “To my favorite child,” it began, “I’ve decided to join the Pepsi Generation.” He later claimed that only two children believed the salutation. I was one of them.

My siblings arrived in quick succession, four girls and a boy; I was the youngest, born after a six-year gap. My sister closest to me in age, Mary Rita, was too much older than me to be a real playmate. Looking back now, it feels as though I was born into a party that had started to wind down. By the time I came around, my parents had matching La-Z-Boy armchairs. Our front door was partly glass, and standing there you could see the back of my mother’s beige armchair in the living room. When any of the kids’ friends rang the doorbell, she’d stick her hand up and make a circling motion. “Go around,” she’d shout, directing them to the unlocked back door.

The families on our block were close, but the kids were all the same ages as my older siblings. They ran in a pack and returned home at dusk. I have a keen memory of what it was like to be a teenager in the seventies because I spent a lot of time with them. My sister Kathleen, ten years older, was and is the most extroverted of our family, and she toted me around like a beloved toy. I remember teetering precariously on the back of her banana seat as she pedaled to the Jewel grocery store on Madison Street. Everyone seemed to know her. “Hey, Beanie!” they called, using her nickname.

In Beanie’s freshmen year of high school, she developed an all-consuming crush on Anton, a quiet blond-haired boy who ran track. She took me with her to one of his meets. We hid high up in the bleachers to peek at him. I remember the love-wrecked expression on her face as we watched him explode forth from the starting line. I didn’t realize it then, but I was losing her to the complexities of high school. Soon I was sitting alone on the top of the back stairs that connected our kitchen to the second floor, watching teenage boys in sideburns chug beers in our breakfast nook as the Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker” played too loud.

Everyone in my family speaks mock reverently about the day in 1974 when the Van sisters—Lisa, my age; Kris, a year older— moved in across the street.

“Thank God,” they tease. “What would we have done with you?”

MANY OF MY PARENTS’ CLOSEST FRIENDS WERE FROM GRAMMAR school and high school. That they’d maintained such close bonds in an increasingly unmoored and transient world was a point of pride for them, as it should be, but it also had the effect, I think, of insulating them. Take them out of their comfort zone, and they became a little ill at ease. I think an undercurrent of shyness ran through them both. They gravitated toward bigger personalities. They used humor, sometimes sharply, to deflect tension. My mother especially seemed always in a state of suppressing— emotions, expectations. She had small, freckled hands and a habit of tugging her fingers when things got unpleasant.

I don’t mean to give the wrong impression. They were bright, curious people who traveled the world once they could afford to. My father argued, and lost, a case in front of the Supreme Court in 1971 that’s still studied in constitutional law classes. They subscribed to the New Yorker. They always had an interest in popular culture and what was considered good, or cool. My mother allowed herself to be taken to see Boogie Nights. (“I’m going to watch The Sound of Music twenty times in a row to forget that,” she said.) They were Kennedy Democrats. “Politically progressive,” my mother liked to say, “but socially conservative.” My father took my older sisters when they were ten and eight downtown to see Martin Luther King speak. They voted for Mondale in ’84. But when I was nineteen, my mother once woke me at dawn in a panic, shaking a handful of unfamiliar (to her) pills. She couldn’t bring herself to say “pill.”

“You’re on the . . . ,” she said.

“Fiber,” I said, and turned back to sleep.

BUT THEN OUR RELATIONSHIP WAS ALWAYS FRAUGHT. MY SISTER Maureen remembers coming home when I was around two and finding my mother pacing the front porch. “I don’t know if I’m crazy,” she said, fighting tears, “or Michelle.” My mother was forty then. She had endured alcoholic parents and the death of an infant son. She was raising six kids with no help. I’m sure I was the crazy one. Her lifelong nickname for me, only half-jokingly, was the Little Witch.

We button-pushed our whole lives. She stonewalled. I glowered. She scribbled notes on envelopes and slid them under my bedroom door. “You’re vain, thoughtless, and rude,” a notorious one went, concluding, “but you’re my daughter and of course I love you very much.” We had a summer cabin on Lake Michigan, and I remember one afternoon as a kid playing in the waves as she read a book in a chair on the beach. I realized that the waves were just high enough so that I could remain underwater and then rise for a quick breath when the wave was at its highest, shielding me from view. I let my mother straighten up and scan the water. I let her put down her book. I let her stand. I let her run toward the water preparing to scream. Only then did I pop up nonchalantly.

I wish now that I’d been kinder to her. I used to rib her about the fact that she couldn’t bear to watch certain scenes in movies or on TV shows. She couldn’t take scenes in which someone threw a party and no one came. She avoided movies about salesmen down on their luck. The specificity was what I found peculiar and amusing; I now see it as the mark of a deeply sensitive person. Her father was once a successful salesman whose career bottomed out. She witnessed her parents’ problems with alcohol and the insistent mime of merrymaking that went on too long. I see her vulnerabilities now. Her parents valued social success and dismissed signs of my mother’s quick, eager mind. She felt thwarted. She could be undermining and cutting in her remarks, but the older me sees that as a reflection of her own undercut self-image.

We swim or sink against our deficits in life, and she made it a point to encourage me in ways that she had not been. I remember that she dissuaded me from trying out for cheerleading in high school. “Don’t you want to be the one cheered?” she said. She thrilled at any of my academic or literary successes. When I was in high school, I came across a letter she’d started to write years before to Aunt Marilyn, my father’s sister, who was a theology professor and accomplished archaeologist. My mother was looking for advice on how to best encourage me as a young writer. “How do I make sure she doesn’t end up writing greeting cards?” she wrote. I thought of that question often in future years, during the many periods when I would have been ecstatic to be paid to write Hallmark greetings.

But I felt her expectations, the transference of hope, and I bristled. I both yearned for her approval and found her investment in me suffocating. She was both proud of the fact that she had raised a strong-minded daughter and resentful of my sharp opinions. It didn’t help matters that my generation was deep into analysis and deconstruction, and hers was not. My mother didn’t, or wouldn’t, navel-gaze in that way. I remember talking with my sister Maureen once about the severe short haircuts we all had as children.

“Doesn’t it seem like Mom was trying to desexualize us?” I asked. Maureen, the mother of three, suppressed a laugh mixed with irritation. “Wait until you have kids, Michelle,” she said. “Short haircuts aren’t desexualizing. They’re easy.”

THE NIGHT BEFORE MY WEDDING, MY MOTHER AND I HAD OUR biggest blowout. I was unemployed and adrift, not writing or doing much of anything, and I’d put a lot of time—too much, probably—into the wedding. At the rehearsal dinner, I seated small groups of people who didn’t know each other together; the only thing I told them was that they all had one thing in common and had to figure out what it was. At one table everyone had lived at some point in Minnesota. Another table was avid cooks.

In the middle of dinner, my mother came up to me as I was making my way toward the bathroom. I’d been avoiding her because a friend had made the mistake of telling me that earlier in the evening she’d remarked to my mother that she thought I was the best writer she knew. “Oh, I know. I think so too,” my mother said. “But don’t you think it’s too late for her?” Her words stung and batted around in my head all night.

I saw her out of the corner of my eye coming toward me. In retrospect, she was smiling. I could see she was pleased with everything; she was never good at giving compliments directly. I’m sure she thought she was being funny. She gestured at the tables.

“You have too much time on your hands,” she said. I turned and faced her with what I’m sure was a mask of pure rage.

“Get away from me,” I spit out. She was shocked and tried to explain, but I cut her off. “Walk away from me. Now.”

I went to the ladies’ room, locked myself in a stall and allowed myself to cry for five minutes, then went back out and pretended that everything was fine.

She was, by all accounts, devastated by my reaction. We never spoke of it, but shortly after the wedding, she wrote me a long letter detailing all the things about me that made her proud. We slowly rebuilt our relationship after that. In late January 2007, my parents decided to take a cruise to Costa Rica. The boat would leave from a port south of Los Angeles. The four of us—my husband, Patton, and I and my parents—had dinner the night before their trip. We laughed a lot, and I drove them to the dock in the morning. My mother and I hugged tightly good-bye.

A few days later, the phone in the kitchen rang at four a.m. I didn’t get up. Then it rang again, but stopped before I could get to it. I listened to the voice mail. It was my father. His voice sounded strangled and almost unintelligible.

“Michelle,” he said. “Call your siblings.” Click.

I called my sister Maureen.

“You don’t know?” she asked.

“What?”

“Oh, Michelle,” she said. “Mom died.”

My mother, a diabetic, had fallen ill on the ship due to complications from her disease. They helicoptered her to San José, but it was too late. She was seventy-four.

Two years later, my daughter, Alice, was born. I was inconsolable for the first two weeks. “Postpartum depression,” my husband explained to friends. But it wasn’t new-mom blues. It was old-mom blues. Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time. Sobbing hysterically, almost unable to speak, I ordered my husband to go down into our dank basement and find the letter my mother had written to me after the wedding. He spent hours down there. Every box was overturned. Papers littered the floor. He couldn’t find it.

SHORTLY AFTER MY MOTHER’S DEATH, MY FATHER, SISTERS, BROTHER, and I went to my parents’ apartment in Deerfield Beach, Florida, to sort through her stuff. We sniffed her clothes that still smelled like Happy perfume by Clinique. We marveled at her bottomless collection of bags, a lifelong obsession. Each of us took something of hers. I took a pair of pink-and-white sandals. They sit in my closet still.

Afterward the seven of us went to an early dinner at the Sea Watch, a nearby restaurant overlooking the ocean. We’re laughers, my family, and we told stories about my mother that made us laugh. Seven people laughing loudly create a scene.

An older woman with a bemused smile came up to our table as she was leaving. “What’s the secret?” she asked.

“I’m sorry?” my brother, Bob, said.

“To such a happy family?”

We sat agape for a few moments. No one had the heart to say what we were all thinking: we’ve just been cleaning out our dead mother’s belongings. We dissolved into more shrieking laughter.

My mother was, and will always be, the most complicated relationship of my life.

Writing this now, I’m struck by two incompatible truths that pain me. No one would have taken more joy from this book than my mother. And I probably wouldn’t have felt the freedom to write it until she was gone.

I WALKED THE SAME HALF MILE TO ST. EDMUND’S EVERY DAY, A LEFT on Randolph, a right on Euclid, a left on Pleasant. The girls wore gray plaid jumpers and white shirts; the boys, a mustard-colored collared shirt and slacks. Ms. Ray, my first-grade teacher, had an hourglass figure and a thick mane of caramel-colored hair, and she was always upbeat. It was Suzanne Somers herding a bunch of six-year-olds. Even so, she’s not my most vivid memory of St. Edmund’s. Nor, curiously enough, is any Catholic teaching or time spent in church, though I know there were a lot of both. No, St. Edmund’s will always be welded in my mind with one image, that of a quiet, well-behaved boy with sandy brown hair and ears that stuck out a little: Danny Olis.

My schooltime crushes ranged wildly in physical and personality type, but I can say with confidence that they all shared one thing—they sat in front of me in class. Other people are able to develop feelings for people sitting next to them or behind them, but not me. That requires connecting with someone too directly, sometimes even craning your neck to make full eye contact. Too real. I loved nothing more than the back of a boy’s head. I could project endlessly on the blank slate of a kid’s slouched back. He could be sitting there with his mouth half-open or picking his nose, and I’d never know.

For a dreamy projectionist like me, Danny Olis was perfect. I don’t recall thinking he was unhappy, but I also can’t picture his smile. He was self-possessed for a little kid, and slightly solemn, as if he knew something the rest of us gap-toothed fairy-tale believers would eventually find out. He was the Sam Shepard of our first-grade class. I’d been gifted with a stuffed Curious George when I was born, and something about Danny’s round, elfin face and big ears reminded me of my George doll. I fell asleep clutching him to my cheek every night. My love for Danny was big news in our house. Sifting through my old stuff during a move once, I came across a card Beanie had written me during her freshmen year at the University of Iowa. “Dear Mish, I miss you. How’s Danny Olis?”

I switched to the local public school, William Beye Elementary, for fourth grade. My best friends, the Van sisters, who’d saved me from loneliness by moving in across the street, went there. I wanted to be with them. I wanted to wear whatever I liked. After a while, I mostly forgot about Danny Olis. My Curious George disappeared, along with my other childhood things.

One night in my junior year of high school, a friend was helping me prepare for a big party I was throwing while my parents were out of town. She’d been hanging out the last few months with some boys from Fenwick, the local all-boys Catholic high school, and asked if a few of them could come to the party. Sure, I said. Actually, she told me tentatively, she was sort of dating one of them.

“Just kind of,” she said.

“That’s great,” I said. “What’s his name?”

“Danny Olis.”

My eyes widened and I half guffawed, half shrieked. I steadied myself and took a breath, the way you do when you’re about to share a big secret.

“You’re not going to believe this,” I said, “but I had the biggest crush on Danny Olis in grade school.”

My friend nodded.

“It started in music class because the teacher made you hold hands,” she said. My confused expression prompted her to continue.

“He told me,” she said.

I recalled nothing about holding hands and music class. And he knew? In my memory I was the quiet girl who sat in the back, faithfully but discreetly observing every swivel and dip of his head. Now it seemed my fixation had been about as subtle as a telenovela. I was mortified.

“Well, he’s very mysterious,” I told her, a little irritated.

She shrugged. “Not to me,” she said.

That night teenagers with Solo cups spilled onto my lawn and into the street. I drank too much gin and ducked and weaved through the throngs of unfamiliar people in my house. Boys I’d dated were there, and boys I would date. Someone played “Suspicious Minds” by the Fine Young Cannibals on repeat.

All night I was acutely aware of a quiet, sandy-haired boy standing in the corner of the kitchen near the refrigerator. His hair now covered his ears. His face had lost its roundness and was more drawn, but through quick glimpses I could see the steady, cryptic expression remained. All night I avoided him. I never looked him in the eye. Despite the gin, I was still the girl in the back of the classroom, watchful, never watched.

TWENTY-SIX YEARS LATER, ONE AFTERNOON IN MAY, I WAS PREPARING to close my laptop when the familiar ring announced a new e-mail. I glanced at my inbox. I’m an inconsistent e-mail correspondent, and sometimes, I’m a little ashamed to admit, it takes me several days or longer to respond. The name in my inbox took a moment to register: Dan Olis. I clicked on the message hesitantly.

Dan, who was now an engineer living in Denver, explained that he had been forwarded a profile of me that ran in the Notre Dame alumni magazine. The article, “Sleuth,” reported that I was the author of a website, True Crime Diary, that attempts to solve cold-case homicides. The writer asked the origin of my obsession with unsolved murders and quoted my reply: “This all started when I was 14. A neighbor of mine was brutally murdered. Very strange case. She was jogging, close to her house. [The police] never solved it. Everyone in the neighborhood was gripped with fear and then moved on. But I never could. I had to figure out how it happened.”

That was the sound-bite version. Another version is as follows. On the evening of August 1, 1984, I’m basking in the hermetically sealed freedom of our house’s renovated third-floor attic bedroom. Every kid in my family spent part of their teenage years up there. It’s my turn. My father hated the attic because it was a firetrap, but for me, a fourteen-year-old tsunami of emotions who signed her journal entries “Michelle, the Writer,” it’s a glorious escape. The carpet is deep orange shag, the ceilings slanted. There’s a bookcase built into the wall that swings open to a secret storage nook. Best of all is the enormous wooden desk that takes up half the room. I have a turntable, a typewriter, and a small window that overlooks my neighbor’s tiled roof. I have a place to dream. In a few weeks I’ll start high school.

At the same time, three-tenths of a mile away, Kathleen Lombardo, twenty-four, is jogging with her Walkman along Pleasant Street. It’s a hot night. Neighbors out on their porch watch Kathleen go by about nine forty-five p.m. She has minutes to live.

I remember hearing someone walk upstairs to the second floor—my sister Maureen, I think—and a murmured conversation, an intake of breath, and then my mother’s footsteps going quickly to the window. We knew the Lombardo family from St. Edmund’s. Word trickled out quickly. Her killer had dragged her into the mouth of the alley between Euclid and Wesley. He cut her throat.

I had no particular interest in crime aside from reading the occasional Nancy Drew book growing up. Yet two days after the killing, without telling anyone, I walked to the spot near our house where Kathleen had been attacked. On the ground I saw pieces of her shattered Walkman. I picked them up. I felt no fear, just an electric curiosity, a current of such unexpected, searching force that I can recall every detail about the moment—the smell of newly cut grass, the chipped brown paint on the garage door. What gripped me was the specter of that question mark where the killer’s face should be. The hollow gap of his identity seemed violently powerful to me.

Unsolved murders became an obsession. I was a hoarder of ominous and puzzling details. I developed a Pavlovian response to the word “mystery.” My library record was a bibliography of the macabre and true. When I meet people and hear where they’re from I orient them in my mind by the nearest unsolved crime. Tell me you went to Miami University of Ohio, and every time I see you I’ll think of Ron Tammen, the wrestler and bassist in the school jazz band who walked out of his dorm room on April 19, 1953—his radio playing, the light on, his psychology book open—and vanished, never to be seen again. Mention you’re from Yorktown, Virginia, and I’ll forever connect you with the Colonial Parkway, the ribbon of road snaking along the York River where four couples either disappeared or were murdered between 1986 and 1989.

In my midthirties, I finally embraced my fascination and, thanks to the advent of Internet technology, my DIY detective website, True Crime Diary, was born.

“Why are you so interested in crime?” people ask me, and I always go back to that moment in the alley, the shards of a dead girl’s Walkman in my hands.

I need to see his face.

He loses his power when we know his face.

Kathleen Lombardo’s murder was never solved.

I would write about her case now and again, and mention it in interviews. I even called the Oak Park Police to fact-check some things. The only real lead was that witnesses reported seeing an African American man in a yellow tank top and headband watching Kathleen intently as she jogged. The police debunked a rumor I remember, that witnesses had seen the killer exit the El train and begin following Kathleen. The rumor’s intent was obvious: the murderer had slipped in among us from somewhere else.

The Oak Park cops gave me the distinct impression that the case was a dead end. And that’s where I thought it stood, until that day when Dan Olis’s name appeared in my inbox. Dan had copied another person on his e-mail to me: Terry Keating. I vaguely recognized the name as a boy a year above us at St. Edmund’s. Dan and Terry, it turns out, are first cousins. They were reaching out to me because they, too, were haunted by Kathleen Lombardo’s murder, but for different, and far more personal, reasons. In his e-mail Dan said hello, how are you, then got right to the point.

“Did you know that some nice St. Edmund’s boys found Kathleen?” he wrote.

The experience had been gruesome and rattling for the kids. They spoke of it often, Dan wrote, mostly because they were angry—the well-known, accepted theory of what happened to Kathleen that night was wrong, in their opinion. They felt they knew the identity of her killer.

In fact, they had encountered him that night.

TERRY AND DAN ARE NOT ONLY COUSINS; THEY SHARED A HOUSE growing up. Dan’s family lived on the first floor; Terry’s, on the second; and their grandmother, on the third. Terry and I survey the back of the old place from the alley.

“How many people would that be?” I ask Terry. The house is about three thousand square feet at most.

“Eleven kids, five adults,” he says.

Just a year apart, Dan and Terry were, and remain, close.

“That summer was a real transition time for us,” Terry says. “Sometimes we stole beers and got drunk. Other times we messed around like when we were kids.”

He gestures at the slab of concrete that abuts the garage in the backyard.

“I remember we were playing hockey, or maybe basketball, that night.” The group comprised Terry, Danny, Danny’s younger brother, Tom, and two grade-school friends, Mike and Darren. It was a little before ten p.m. Someone suggested they head down the alley to the White Hen, a small convenience store on Euclid, about a block and a half away. They went to the White Hen all the time, sometimes three or four times a day, for a Kit Kat or a Coke.

Terry and I head north from the house. He spent so much time in this alley as a kid, he can spot all the little ways it’s changed.

“It was darker at night back then,” he says. “Like a cave almost. The branches would stick out and hang down more.”

An unfamiliar tree in a neighbor’s backyard draws his attention. “Bamboo,” he says. “Can you believe it?”

About fifty feet from where the alley intersects with Pleasant Street, Terry stops. A gaggle of preteen and teen boys shooting the shit, as Terry recalls them doing, can be raucous. They distracted themselves with goofball antics. This spot haunts him. Looking straight ahead you can see the mouth of the alley across the street.

“If we’d been paying attention, we might have seen her run by,” he says. “We might have seen him grab her.”

We cross the street to the alcove behind 143 South Wesley Avenue. The five boys were walking together in a straight line. Danny was on his right, Terry remembers. He puts a hand on the fence near the garage and rattles it.

“I think this is the same fence, but it was painted red then,” Terry says.

He thought he glimpsed a rolled-up rug near the garbage cans. Kathleen’s legs were very pale, and in the dark Terry mistook them for a light-colored carpet. Then Danny, who was closest to her, shouted.

“That’s a body!”

Terry and I stare at the spot alongside the garage where Kathleen lay on her back. It was clear immediately that her throat had been slashed. Blood pooled around her feet. There was a terrible smell. Probably her stomach gases, Terry guesses now. Darren, a “delicate kid,” as Terry describes him, walked slowly backward to the opposite garage with his hands on top of his head, bugging out. Tom took off toward the nearest back door, yelling for help.

The next moment is where the accepted narrative of Kathleen Lombardo’s murder diverges from Terry and Dan’s memory. They remember that Kathleen still had vital signs but died in the minutes between their discovery of her and the arrival of a swarm of police. They remember the detectives telling them they must have just walked up on the guy.

They remember a man emerging from the alley almost simultaneously as they discovered Kathleen’s body. He was tall and appeared to be of Indian descent. He wore a linen shirt opened to his navel, shorts, and sandals.

“What’s going on here?” he asked. Terry says the man never looked in the direction of the body.

“Someone’s hurt. We need to call the police,” Mike shouted at the man. The man shook his head.

“I don’t have a phone,” he said.

The chaos of the scene obscures the next sequence of events. Terry remembers the patrol car pulling up, driven by a skeptical uniformed cop with a mustache who asked sarcastically where the body was. He remembers the change in tone and urgent radio for help when the cop saw Kathleen. He remembers the cop’s partner, a younger guy, maybe even a trainee, leaning against the side of the car, retching.

He remembers Darren against the garage, his hands still to his head, rocking back and forth. And then a siege of lights and sirens, the likes of which Terry had never seen before or since.

Seven years later, Terry happened to carpool to a concert with a guy named Tom McBride, who lived a few doors down from the murder scene. Terry and Tom had been enemies as kids, in the way you are when you don’t know each other and go to different schools. Tom, Terry says, was a “public,” as the Catholic kids called them. But Terry discovered that Tom was actually a really good guy. They gabbed all night.

“Weren’t you one of the kids that found that body?” Tom asked.

Terry said he was. Tom’s eyes narrowed.

“I always thought someone in the neighborhood did it.”

An image came back to Terry, the man in the open linen shirt, the strange way he wouldn’t look at Kathleen’s body. The way he’d asked them what was going on here, when it was clear something horrible was.

Terry’s stomach tightened.

“What did he look like?” Terry asked.

Tom described him. Tall. From India. A real creep.

“He was right there when we found her!” Terry said.

Tom’s color drained. He couldn’t believe it. He remembered clearly that, in the clamor after the discovery of the body, the neighbor, who appeared freshly showered and was dressed in a robe, came out his back door to survey the police cars. He’d turned to Tom and his family, who were out on their back porch.

“Did he say anything?” Terry asked.

Tom nodded.

“What’s going on here?” the neighbor said.

THEY NEVER CAUGHT HER KILLER. AND THOSE PIECES OF HER SHATTERED Walkman that I picked up at her crime scene are jangling around in my head thirty years later as I steer my rental car onto Capitol Avenue in Sacramento. I take it east, out of town, until it turns into Folsom Boulevard. I stay on Folsom, past Sac State and the Sutter Center for Psychiatry, past the empty lots of scrub and scattered oak trees. Running parallel on my right is the Gold Line, a light-rail transit system that runs from downtown to Folsom, twenty-five miles east. The route is historic. The tracks were once used for the Sacramento Valley Railroad, built in 1856, the first steam railroad to connect the city with the mining camps in the Sierras. Crossing Bradshaw Road, I spot signs reading PAWN and 6 POCKET SPORTS BAR. Across the road are petroleum storage tanks behind a rusty chain-link fence. I’m at my destination. Where it all started: the city of Rancho Cordova.