One Last Rock Before Sunset

It is golden hour, that magical time before sunset when the world is bathed in a fierce gold light. Hazel Wright rocks on her porch. She's 87, arthritic and constantly in pain. Her back is curved like a question mark. She watches the green-backed hummingbirds zip around the feeder she made from a soy sauce bottle and a strip of copper wire. 

The man waits inside. As carefully instructed, he stands back where no one can see him and touches nothing. He has plenty of misgivings and is sweating and shaking with fear, but like most people once on a path, he can't imagine any other way. 

Hazel takes one last look at the neighborhood she should have left. Rows of metal fenced two-story working class homes with overgrown lawns. People park their cars right on the grass inside their fences. Back in Hazel's day, there were no fences, and you wouldn't dream of parking a car on your own lawn. 

Things are different now. Cars out on the street at night are stripped for parts. Gangs of boys ride around shouting out car windows. Some have guns. Two weeks ago, a little girl, just seven years old, was shot in the leg while asleep in her bed. She will walk again but will carry a nasty scar. 

Hazel never goes anywhere anymore. Once a week, a welfare worker shows up with groceries. Hazel feels humiliated by this - like she is one of those lazy welfare women - but what choice does she have? 

Her grandson Parker used to do the shopping. He was a good boy. Good as gold, she always said. People pitied him. They said he had mush for brains. But he wasn't as dumb as everyone said. And what good did brains ever do Hazel's family? 

Her husband was smart, but that didn't stop a brain aneurism from killing him. Her daughter was smart. Top of her class, but she still got pregnant three times by different men, before running off to California and leaving just Parker behind. 

The Wrights were a family ill-fated. A great-uncle was killed in the first World War, two aunts were taken by the Spanish flu. Her own mother died at 45 from breast cancer, and her dad, not long after, was killed in a freak tractor accident.

Then her grandfather - a skilled engineer and a man blessed with real brains and raw talent - got killed by a black man outside a bar. Hazel swears everything would have been different if not for that night. 

Sometimes Hazel takes out the family tree and examines it on the porch. The tree was painted by her grandmother in watercolors on old parchment and the names written in calligraphy. Looking at it makes Hazel angry. Everyone is gone.

Hazel's only daughter never visited from California. A card at Christmas, maybe. Flowers delivered for her birthday. The cheap kind, mostly filler and unnaturally red carnations, dead the next day. Not a word ever about Hazel's other two grandkids.  

And then her daughter died. A drug overdose, a lawyer wrote in a letter. Whatever happened to the children was anyone's guess. Hazel folded the letter from the lawyer and put it in a desk.

Now, she's all alone. For a time, there was Parker. But then he died too.

But no matter, she thinks. It will all come right today. She would see to that. 

Hazel rises with effort from her rocking chair. She's matchstick thin. Her bones are brittle. Last May, she fell in the kitchen and broke her hip. She had surgery but the bone never healed properly. Every step feels like a needle stabbing into her side. 

Hazel struggles to keep her balance as she pulls open the screen porch door. The man steps forward into the light, as if to help, but Hazel scowls at him. He looks down and shrinks back into the shadows. 

Hazel lies on the cot in the makeshift bedroom on the first floor. Ever since the fall, she hasn't been upstairs. She stares at the ceiling at an orange water stain shaped like a heart, with a small cloud of mold in its center. She checks one last time to be sure the small black notebook is there on the nightstand. She can sense the man hovering just outside her door. "Give me a minute," she says. 

She clasps her hands together and closes her eyes as if to pray. But it's no use. She hasn't prayed in years. The once familiar flow of words, which she used to recite like an incantation, won't come. 

"Ok, I'm ready," she says. "Let's get this over with." 

Ten minutes later, Hazel Wright is dead. 

_

Murders aren't uncommon in and around Haverly, but this one left people shocked. Someone had gone into an old lady's home and suffocated her as she slept.

Perry and Lisa Jackson saw the squad cars and ambulance on their way home from work at their diner. Their boys, Ryan and Matt, used to play with Hazel's grandson when they were small.

The Jackson boys were good kids. Growing up in a place like Haverly, this didn't mean they were boy scouts or on the honor roll. It meant they weren't in a gang or in jail. Ryan was 15 and Matt was 14.

They used to call kids born within 12 months of each other, "Irish twins". Ryan and Matt weren't Irish, or not as far as anyone knew. They had light black skin. Their exact ages were just approximations. The boys were dumped off one night beside the huge trash bins out back of the Jackson's diner.

Elvin, a cook, found them while on a cigarette break. The babies (one just a few weeks old, the other maybe a year) were swaddled in blankets on each side of an open nylon suitcase. 

The Jacksons got permission to foster the boys and eventually adopted them. They were like a gift from God. The Jacksons couldn't have children of their own. They told friends the boys were the sons of an old Army buddy of Perry's, who died with his wife in a car crash. Even the boys thought this was their story. Elvin, or course, knew otherwise. But just days after the boys were discovered, he quit the diner and moved out west.

___

Just as the Jacksons sit down to dinner on the same day Hazel's body is discovered, policemen hammer on the family's front door. Lisa opens the door. There are three of them: two massive white men with sweaty faces. There's also a young new-looking recruit. He's handsome and black.

The police barge past Lisa and into the dining room. Perry starts to rise but one of the police draws his gun and levels it at Perry, who sits slowly back down. He's read enough stories recently to know how quickly a situation like this can turn tragic.  

"Gentleman, how can I help you?" asks Perry, forcing a thin smile and keeping his hands visible on the table.

"Your boys are under arrest for murder," snaps one of the big white men. 

"That's impossible," says Lisa. "My boys are good boys."

"Shut it!" says the officer, pointing his gun in her direction and waving her into her chair.  

Lisa bites her lip so hard it bleeds. There's a sharp metallic taste in her mouth. She has the presence of mind to identify the flavor as rage. 

The boys look at each other confused. Ryan starts to say something but is silenced by the steely look in his father's eyes. 

Perry takes a deep breath. "Sir, could one of you please explain who our boys are accused of murdering? I can assure you they have nothing to do with this." 

"Hazel Wright, your neighbor. We have it in her own writing, her final words."

Perry and Lisa look at each other baffled. 

The boys are handcuffed and marched out the front door. It happens so fast. It's only after they've gone that the couple fully take in what's just happened.  

---

The trial lasts two days. A continuance is denied. The court-appointed lawyer is a joke. He's a year out of law school. An earnest young man from a wealthy suburb, nowhere near here. He makes so many mistakes during the trial that even the judge can't stop himself from rolling his eyes. The young lawyer is condescending and peevish. The jury is repulsed. 

It should have been an open and shut case. Zero motive, no fingerprints or eyewitnesses. None of the woman's belongings were found in the boys' rooms, and the only evidence, a scribbled message in a small black notebook supposedly written by the victim. Hazel claimed the Jackson boys wished her dead and she was very afraid.

After the trial, the couple stay home from work. A new manager runs the diner fine without them. They can't face seeing anyone. People nod in sympathy when told the story, but there's something in their eyes that says they're not convinced the boys are innocent. Even Lisa, each time she repeats the story, feels she's protesting a little too much. 

She tells her husband she thinks she's going crazy. She wants him to take her in his arms and say it will be okay. They will appeal the case and win. Their boys will return home. But Perry is locked inside his own grief. He can't bear to be touched. The slightest emotional release will push him over the edge, he feels. 

The couple pace about their kitchen like they too are in jail. They rehash every minute in court, the evidence, the lawyer's mistakes. They run through every single interaction their family has ever had with Hazel Wright. 

When the boys were young, they played with Hazel's grandson Parker. He was a sweet boy. Not too bright. Had some kind of learning difficulty. Hazel was polite enough, but seemed to hold a grudge against their family, or maybe it was just because they were black. She told anyone who'd listen that "colored folks" had ruined her neighborhood.

But the Jacksons felt sorry for her. Most days she sat rocking all alone on her porch. She lost her husband, her only daughter and then her grandson too. Parker was playing with a gun. He couldn't have been more than 15. 

The Jackson boys were 11 and 12 at the time. They hadn't played with Parker in years. When they were small, they were always in the front yard of the Wright's house.

There was one time, Perry remembered, a Sunday afternoon in June. The boys were small. Maybe 6 and 7. Family was coming from out of town. Perry went to collect the boys from the Wright's front yard. A neighbor of the Wright's had a hose in his hand and was watering his lawn. Every once in a while, he'd spray a stream of water at the boys - the sun catching the spray and casting a rainbow - and the boys would yelp and tumble around the lawn like puppies. 

"Those boys play so well together, they could be brothers," the man said. Perry smiled and laughed at the comment, but he remembered the way the old woman, standing in her doorway, had scowled. He waved at her anyway, as he clapped his boys around their shoulders and walked them home. 

But none of this matters now. Perry picks up a phone to call his friend Stav. The two served in Vietnam together. What were the odds? Two men from the same small town in the same unit in the same sweaty pocket of a Vietnamese jungle? Stav became a private detective, Perry had heard, and had a reputation for always getting his man. 

---

Stav steps out into the light. It's 3 p.m., and he's just waking up. It's been days since he's been outside. He hasn't shaved. He feels light-headed and, even though he hasn't touched a drop of booze in nine years, he feels like he's recovering from an all-night bender. It's the chemo. He has lung cancer, even though he's never smoked a day in his life. Second-hand smoke, he supposes. He should have been in a different line of work. Not gone to so many bars. 

Perry's call is what gets him out of the house and out of his funk. He hasn't had any business in years. His reputation for always getting his man is as dated as his 1967 baby blue Chevrolet Impala and the long sideburns his ex-wife Arabella says make him look like a drug dealer. 

Stav meets Perry at his diner. Perry runs through the case. The men talk for hours until it's dark outside and a waitress is sweeping around their feet. Peter tells him every single thing he can remember about every interaction the family ever had with Hazel Wright. 

He tells Stav about their own lives. How he and Lisa were both only children. How he was the last Jackson in the family line until the boys miraculously appeared. And how they both had earnest, hard-working parents who pushed them to study. He talks about the black sheep of the family, his own great-grandfather, who no one wanted to talk about. He was accused of murder and left town.

He tells Stav about the night they discovered the boys. How he and Lisa had longed for children, and how people pitied them. He said he'd never forget that night everything changed. And how Elvin, the cook, had come running into the diner, shouting "Lisa! Perry! Come quick! There are two baby boys out back!"

Perry runs through the lack of evidence a third time with Stav. He offers a blow-by- blow from the court. At this point, Stav cuts him off. He says he's sure the boys are innocent. He tells Perry not to worry. But as Stav walks out the diner and gets into his car, it is he who is worried. He's an old hack in failing health. What can he do? 

The next morning, Stav calls a friend at the police station. He's a former drinking buddy named Finn. Stav learns that the police had nothing, just a scribbled note in a little black notebook found on Hazel Wright's nightstand. Stav points out that this could have been written by anyone, and the case against the Jackson boys should have been thrown out. 

He learns that the family was up against Edmund Miller, an old-school lawyer who ran circles around the green public defender. He's spent decades "cleaning the streets of boys just like these". His exact words in court. The boys were so terrified and ill-prepared by the lawyer, they made little eye contact with anyone, least of all the jury. This only reinforced in jurors' minds that they were guilty. 

Stav has been on the case for three weeks. He's learned absolutely nothing more. There's nothing to know. Again, there were no witnesses, no fingerprints, no evidence at all. Nothing but the note, written in chicken scrawl by an angry old woman with a reputation for hating her black neighbors. 

Interviewing the boys, it's clear they had nothing to do with this woman's death. Stav has interviewed enough criminals to know. These boys are either extremely clever psychopaths or are totally innocent. He's sure it's the latter. But then who did kill this woman? And why would anyone frame the Jacksons? No one gained from Hazel Wright's death.

---

Stav attends the reading of Hazel Wright's will. He learns that in addition to her house, she had $20,000. A policeman found it under the kitchen sink in an old coffee can. After weeks of trying to track down an heir, they've had no luck finding any surviving family members. What's more, there is no evidence that Hazel's two grandsons ever went to California with their mother.

It's this that sends a shiver up Stav's spine. He knows when he's onto something important when he gets a chill like this. He heads to the local library. He skims over 200 years of Haverly news on microfiche. One story finally catches Stav's eye. In 1909, Phillip Parker, Jr., chief engineer at a steel company was killed in a brawl outside a tavern. The man accused was Nathan Jackson. He skipped town before being arrested.  

Stav calls Finn. He needs that small black notebook found by Hazel's bed.

"Tell anyone you got this from me and I'll throw your ass in jail," says Finn. 

Stav sits in his kitchen with the dim light casting shadows on the linoleum floor. His hands are shaking as he handles the little black notebook. The cover is soft and worn. A frayed elastic strap holds it closed. Inside the pages are silky and yellowed with age. The pages are indented with her words, as if Hazel wasn't so much writing as stabbing the book with a pen. 

Stav reads through the notebook three times but there's nothing there. Aside from the one page with the accusation that the Jackson boys wished her dead and she was afraid, the rest is pretty random. This isn't a diary. There are shopping lists, To Do lists, and a handful of names, addresses and telephone numbers. And in back, what looks like a list of relatives - and how they died - written in bright red scrawl. 

Exhausted, Stav switches off his light and falls asleep, fully dressed on top of his bed cover. It's 3 a.m. when Stav wakes with a start. 

He grabs the little black notebook and flips to the page he knows is there. The page he saw, but must have had to sleep on to process. It's a name: Elvin Jones. And an address. 22 South Lincoln Ave., Hollywood, CA.

The tingling up his spine is back. Elvin. Not a common name in a small town like Haverly. And not a small coincidence that his last known address is Hollywood, where Hazel's daughter moved. One name among a handful of names in Hazel's book. What are the chances?

What was it Perry said? The cook at the diner, Elvin, was having a cigarette break and found the babies? He was the one who told Perry and Lisa about them being out back. But he didn't say he discovered "babies". No, he said "baby boys". Stav was sure of it. But how did Elvin know they were boys? 

He wouldn't have unswaddled them to find out their gender. And here, the puzzle is starting to come together for Stav. Perhaps Elvin knew they were boys because he was their father. What else did Perry say about Elvin? Soon after, the cook quit the diner and moved west. Out west with Hazel's daughter, the boys' mother? Before leaving, the couple found their boys a good home, one with Perry and Lisa Jackson.

That part of the mystery potentially resolved, it's then Stav flips to the list of family names in the back of Hazel's little black book--the list of family members who had died. Stav hadn't examined it properly before. But now he knows exactly what he'll find there: Hazel Wright's motive.

Sure enough, there it is. Hazel's grandfather, Phillip Parker, Jr. And right by his name is the name of his accused killer: Nathan Jackson. 

He thinks back to the story Perry told him. The only black sheep. A great-grandfather family never mentioned. Accused of murder, leaves town.

Stav is right and he knows it. Right about everything. He feels it in a tingling in his spine. It all boils down to a family blood feud. Hazel Wright, an embittered old woman, with no living relations, avenges her grandfather's death by planning her own murder and implicating the only heirs of Nathan Jackson. 

But what Hazel didn't know is those two boys were her heirs too. Once this newfound evidence is presented, thinks Stav, the boys will not only be set free. As Hazel Wright's sole heirs, they will inherit $20,000 and her home. 

---