The Sins of Brother Curtis by Lisa Davis

Author:Lisa Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

After more than a dozen years locked up, Bobby Goodall had wanted nothing more than to be in the woods. It’s where he came closest to finding peace. When the phone rang, Bobby lay stretched across the bed in the double-wide trailer that he’d put on five acres in southwest Washington, outside of Shelton, a logging town on Puget Sound. He’d built a home cradled in the lush, wet green of the fir and hemlock, and married his new bride only a few months earlier on a wooden dock he’d built over the lake where he fished for trout and bass. In some ways, he figured, this was his reward; survival and success had blurred together. Bobby had done the prison-release work, building and painting for the government, but ultimately he’d gone back to what he knew best and did most proficiently. His small estate here was built with drug money.

Bobby’s wife handed him the phone with a look and a shrug that told him the caller was unfamiliar, which meant suspicious.

“Yeah,” he said into the phone.

“Is this Bobby Goodall?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you the Bobby Goodall who grew up in southeast Portland in the late 1970s?”

“Yeah.”

“Bobby, my name is Tim Kosnoff. I’m a lawyer in Seattle and I represent a young man named Jeremiah Scott who is suing the Mormon church. Can I ask you some questions?”

“Okay.”

The Mormons. Bobby started thinking but was distracted by the next question.

“Do you know Manny Saban?”

“Yeah.”

Bobby hadn’t seen Manny in years. He hadn’t seen anyone from the neighborhood in at least a decade, and even then it was only when he randomly ran into someone’s sister somewhere. His mind started to drift back to Manny’s house and the park and the Dairy Queen and his friends. Then Kosnoff dropped a bomb, and it was like someone had changed the channel in Bobby’s brain.

“Bobby,” the lawyer said, “did you know a man named Frank Curtis?”

Bobby stared at the ceiling, his mind racing, trying to absorb all that was coming at it—an impossible task. Frank Curtis. Brother Curtis. So many years ago. What the hell could this be?

“Yeah,” he said. “I knew Frank Curtis.”

The two men talked more about people and places in Portland. Kosnoff asked Bobby where he’d first met Frank Curtis, and Bobby told him about the Duke Street neighborhood, the veterinary clinic, and then the junkyard apartment. Bobby sensed that he’d passed some test, that he’d convinced Kosnoff that he knew enough to be regarded as an insider. At some point he’d realized what it was that Kosnoff wanted to know, and eventually he had told him about the sexual abuse.

Bobby hung up the phone and looked at his wife, who searched his face for information. He told her simply that the call had to do with a lawsuit about something that happened when he was a kid, and then he grabbed the keys to his truck, walked out of the house, and took off down the road to the bar.

Emotion surrounded Bobby like some kind of poisonous gas.

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