Debbi remembers the first twelve years of her life in a warm amber light. Cheri doling out home-baked sugar cookies. Picnic lunches at Nojoqui Falls Park. She loved having young parents, the kind who didn’t watch you from the park bench but hoisted you onto the monkey bars and scrambled up the rocks after you at the beach. Cheri and Roger were physically fit people raised in the sun, and their demeanor showed it. “I didn’t know what cynicism was until I hit junior high,” Debbi says.
A strain developed between Cheri and Roger somewhere along the line. There exists a 1,157-page Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department report, much of it dedicated to the details of Cheri’s life; on page 130, Roger is questioned about their marriage, in particular their social life in Santa Barbara. He recalls outdoor picnics. They liked to visit Solvang, he says, a quaint Danish-themed village nearby. Midinterview he switches pronouns from “we” to “she.” Cheri liked to dance. She liked to “party.” It’s unclear if the quotations are Roger’s or the interviewer’s. But they hang there accusingly. Cheri wasn’t a drug abuser or hard drinker; the word “party” likely reveals more about inclination. Roger was content with a wicker basket and a blanket on the grass; at some point Cheri wanted more. They separated in December 1976.
Roger moved back to San Diego, and Debbi and David split their time between the two cities. Debbi recognized an opportunity in the family splinter. She began playing her parents against each other. She tested limits. Ignored house rules. At the slightest hint of pushback she’d pack her bag and announce she was going to live with the other parent. She ping-ponged this way for several years, shuttling back and forth between San Diego and Santa Barbara, switching schools at least a half-dozen times, sometimes midyear. By July 1981, her once good grades had taken a dive. She was hung up on an older boyfriend in San Diego whom Cheri and Roger, who rarely were in accord on anything, agreed was bad news.
A defiant teenager in full rebellious bloom can rattle the most stable of families, so it didn’t help matters that Cheri’s life was in flux and under stress too. In June, with the economy tanking, she and Ellen were laid off from their jobs at Trimm Industries, a small firm that manufactured computer furniture. Cheri spearheaded their search for new employment by renting an IBM Selectric typewriter and polishing their résumés. Then, on top of everything else, she decided to move.
For several years, Cheri and the kids, when they weren’t in San Diego with their dad, lived in a rented guesthouse in Montecito. But in May Cheri’s father’s cousin, known to the family as Aunt Barbara, called to say she was putting her house in Goleta on the market and moving to Fresno. Aunt Barbara didn’t want the house to be empty while it was for sale. Would Cheri and the kids like to house-sit?
Aunt Barbara lived on Toltec Way, a cul-de-sac in a quiet, leafy pocket of northeast Goleta, adjacent to San Jose Creek. The wood-shingled Cape Cod–style house had a second-story addition over the garage and shuttered windows. To the neighbors, it was “the big red barn.” What sealed the deal for Cheri was that by sheer coincidence Ellen lived catercorner on Toltec Drive.
In early June, Cheri and the kids, with the help of a moving company, hauled their belongings into 449 Toltec Way. Eucalyptus draped heavily here. The quiet seemed not so much peaceful as mandated by nature, but the stillness didn’t still Debbi. The action was in the Mesa area of Santa Barbara or back with her friends in Montecito. Everything felt provisional. Temporary. A Realtor would be conducting open houses. A sign on their lawn read SANTANA PROPERTIES / FOR SALE. Debbi missed the bad-influence boyfriend in San Diego and racked up enormous phone bills calling him. A few weeks after moving in, after an explosive blowout with Cheri, she shoved what she could into a bag, hopped on her bike, and took off.
Most nights Cheri walked across the street to Ellen’s, and the friends opened a bottle of wine and hopped into the Jacuzzi. They talked about Cheri’s fight with Roger over child support. Job searches. Love. Cheri had started experimenting with personal ads and professional dating services. There’d been a few stilted dates at downtown restaurants. One man had called the office for Cheri and mysteriously left his name as “Marco Polo.” Cheri laughed when she took the message but revealed nothing. Ellen knew that Cheri wanted to marry again, that her friend, a little surprisingly for a divorcée, was an old-fashioned romantic who yearned for the gauzy postcard image of love—the radiant couple walking hand in hand on the beach at sunset.
Cheri was circumspect about the one man who’d come closest to winning her heart since the divorce. Ellen never met him because the relationship predated Ellen’s friendship with Cheri, but she spied him once slipping into Cheri’s office at work. He was much younger than Cheri, gorgeous, tall, and immaculately put together, with thick dark hair. All Ellen knew was that they’d had an on-and-off relationship for years, but Cheri had recently decided it was over. Time to move on.
Mostly the two women talked about Cheri’s problems with Debbi. Tough love, Ellen said. Consequences.
“Put your foot down,” she advised.
WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT CHERI DID WHEN DEBBI CALLED HER four days after their clash at Klein Bottle. Debbi had one thing on her mind, and it wasn’t an apology or an olive branch, but a swimsuit. She’d left it behind at the Toltec house.
“I need to come get my swimsuit,” she said.
“No,” Cheri said.
“What?”
“I said no,” Cheri said.
“It’s my swimsuit!”
“It’s my house!”
Debbi howled angrily into the phone. Cheri howled back. People on State Street slowed, sensing a scene. Debbi didn’t care what the gawkers thought. Her body quaked with rage. The worst thing she could think to say spouted forth from her mouth with wild force.
“Why don’t you just get the hell out of my life!” she screamed. She slammed down the phone.
The next day around two thirty p.m., Debbi got a call at the friend’s house where she was crashing. The caller was a co-worker of Debbi’s from the Granada Theater. Her mother’s friend Ellen had phoned the theater looking for Debbi and left word that Debbi should call her immediately. Debbi steeled herself for the inevitable guilt trip Ellen would unload on her about how she was treating her mother. Ellen’s first words didn’t surprise Debbi at all. She could imagine Ellen standing there, hand on hip, lips pursed in judgment.
“You need to come home,” Ellen said.
“I’m not coming home,” Debbi said. “No way.”
Ellen and Debbi have different memories of what exactly was said next, but both agree Debbi quickly understood she needed to come right away. That it was urgent. Debbi sat in the front seat of her friend’s Volkswagen bus on the ride there, her mind racing with possibilities. What she remembers most about pulling up to Toltec Way was the yellow crime-scene tape, how it cordoned off not only the street itself but also the second house on the west side of the street. The big red barn. Aunt Barbara’s house.
How strange it was to see dozens of people swarming the normally empty cul-de-sac. Uniformed officers. Detectives in suits. The media. The din had the pitch of stress and confusion. People moved quickly, coming together and then pivoting, seekers of information with strained expressions. Somehow Debbi was led under the tape. She walked in a daze through the clamor.
Why don’t you just get the hell out of my life!
Her heart leaped when she spotted her mother’s car, a brown Datsun 280ZX, parked in the driveway.
And then she recognized another car, a white Camaro with two black racing stripes, parked in front of the house.
“Where’s Greg?” Debbi asked no one in particular. She looked around for him, her voice rising. “I want to talk to Greg!”
The swarm in the cul-de-sac froze and turned toward her in unison, a mob of raised eyebrows. They repeated two words as they closed in on her—an odd, needling harmony that contributed to the dreamlike trance Debbi floated through as she made her way toward the place she hoped her mother would be.
“Greg who? Greg who? Greg who?”