Teenager Marlene Vaughan’s mother Gertrude was murdered in 1953. They lived in Baldwin Park, in the central San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County. Gertrude was abducted from a bar in El Monte and found dead in Azusa. The case was never solved.

Four years later, Marlene obtains a lead on the killers, learning that they have returned to Los Angeles. She reconnects with her old friend Robby, and asks him to help her solve the crime because “he’s the smartest boy she ever knew.”

Robby recruits a team to work on the crime, including his stepmother, Clara, and his youngest uncle, Melvin. They form a picture of two itinerant salesmen who periodically visit L.A. and frequent the Silver Dollar Saloon in El Monte, where Gertrude disappeared.

The amateur detectives put the clues together and suspect that there are two killers, both World War II veterans, one with anger issues caused by a war injury, and the other a passive sidekick.

This complex murder mystery is a sequel to the author’s book Life Could Be a Dream, and provides an intimate glimpse into life in Southern California in the 1950s.

The summer of 1954 begins a pivotal year in nine-year-old Robby Barnaby’s life. On the last day of school, he breaks his arm sliding into home plate while playing for the fifth graders in an all-star game against the sixth graders.

Baseball is his passion, and Robby excels at it, though he is younger than his classmates. He lives in a new suburb of Los Angeles called Watertown, an idyllic childhood spot with open fields and well-equipped schoolyards.

He and his older brother Cyrus are entrepreneurs, trading coins and selling newspapers. In addition, he works for his teacher, Miss Oliver. He has two younger brothers, six-year-old Stanley, who is frail and sickly, and Glyndon, who turns four in December.

On their annual vacation on Balboa Island, he learns his family is moving to a city across L.A. that offers little for kids to do. Before the move, his mother dies from surgery, leaving him in the care of his abusive father.

Everything in life has become so unreal that Robby dreams of his dead mother. Miss Oliver offers to adopt him, but his father refuses. His new home is a chicken ranch in Orcutt Park, a town with no baseball and a brutal junior high. Robby and Cyrus are miserable, and their younger brothers are lost without their mom. What will happen to these boys?

Learn more by reading Chapter 10 here: